Observational constraints on tidal effects using orbital eccentricities.?

We have analysed radial velocity measurements for known transiting exoplanets to study the empirical signature of tidal orbital evolution for close-in planets. Compared to standard eccentricity determination, our approach is modified to focus on the re-jection of the null hypothesis of a circular orbit. We are using a MCMC analysis of radial velocity measurements and photometric constraints, including a component of correlated noise, as well as Bayesian model selection to check if the data justifies the additional complexity of an eccentric orbit. We find that among planets with non-zero eccentricity values quoted in the literature, there is no evidence for an eccentricity detection for the 7 planets CoRoT-5b, WASP-5b, WASP-6b, WASP-10b, WASP-12b, WASP-17b, and WASP-18b. In contrast, we confirm the eccentricity of HAT-P-16b, e = 0.034 ± 0.003, the smallest eccentricity that is reliably measured so far for an exoplanet as well as that of WASP-14b, which is the planet at the shortest period (P = 2.24 d), with a confirmed eccentricity, e = 0.088 ± 0.003. As part of the study