The EXPLORE Project: A Deep Search for Transiting Extrasolar Planets

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

We present the first results from a deep search for transiting close-in extrasolar planets around Galactic field stars. Using the MOSAIC II 36'x36' wide-field imager on the CTIO 4m telescope, we monitored a single field near the galactic plane with ~100,000 stars with I<18.2. We took an image every 2.75 minutes throughout 11 nights in June 2001, 6 of which had good weather. Using a custom written data analysis pipeline that includes aperture photometry with sinc-shift centroiding, and iterative relative photometry, we generated lightcurves where the best 37,000 have 0.2%--1% rms. Several lightcurves have shallow flat-bottomed eclipses, which are indicative of a companion that is fully superimposed on the stellar disk. Flat bottomed eclipses allow us to select likely planet transit candidates with no contamination from grazing binaries. Because late M dwarfs, brown dwarfs, and gas giant planets are all of similar sizes, radial velocity measurements are needed to constrain the companion mass. We have obtained VLT+UVES follow-up radial velocity measurements of 3 planet transit candidates. We describe our method and present lightcurves and radial velocity data for our best candidates.

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