TOI-1268b: The youngest hot Saturn-mass transiting exoplanet

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<SUB>*</SUB> = 0.96 ± 0.04 M<SUB>⊙</SUB>, a radius of R<SUB>*</SUB> = 0.92 ± 0.06 R<SUB>⊙</SUB>, an effective temperature of T<SUB>eff</SUB> = 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 Ondřejov Observatories, we measured a planetary mass of M<SUB>p</SUB> = 96.4 ± 8.3 M<SUB>⊕</SUB> and a radius of R<SUB>p</SUB> = 9.1 ± 0.6 R<SUB>⊕</SUB>. 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<SUP>4.5-5.3</SUP>. When compared with the sample of other non-inflated Saturn-mass planets, TOI-1268b is one of the best candidates for transmission spectroscopy studies.