Abstract
We report the discovery of TOI-1268b, a transiting Saturn-mass planet from the TESS space mission. With an age of less than 1 Gyr, derived from various age indicators, TOI-1268b is the youngest Saturn-mass planet known to date; it contributes to the small sample of well-characterised young planets.
It has an orbital period of P = 8.1577080 +/- 0.0000044 days, and transits an early K-dwarf star with a mass of M-* = 0.96 +/- 0.04 M-circle dot, a radius of R-* = 0.92 +/- 0.06 R-circle dot, an effective temperature of T-eff = 5300 +/- 100 K, and a metallicity of 0.36 +/- 0.06 dex. By combining TESS photometry with high-resolution spectra acquired with the Tull spectrograph at the McDonald Observatory, and the high-resolution spectrographs at the Tautenburg and Ondrejov Observatories, we measured a planetary mass of M-p = 96.4 +/- 8.3 M-circle plus and a radius of R-p = 9.1 +/- 0.6 R-circle plus.
TOI-1268 is an ideal system for studying the role of star-planet tidal interactions for non-inflated Saturn-mass planets. We used system parameters derived in this paper to constrain the planet's tidal quality factor to the range of 10(4.5-5.3).
When compared with the sample of other non-inflated Saturn-mass planets, TOI-1268b is one of the best candidates for transmission spectroscopy studies.