Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2006-11-14
Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.375:29-52,2007
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
26 pages, 10 figures, to appear in MNRAS. A PDF with full resolution figures is available from http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/~suz
Scientific paper
10.1111/j.1365-2966.2006.11303.x
The Monitor project is a photometric monitoring survey of nine young (1-200Myr) clusters in the solar neighbourhood to search for eclipses by very low mass stars and brown dwarfs and for planetary transits in the light curves of cluster members. It began in the autumn of 2004 and uses several 2 to 4m telescopes worldwide. We aim to calibrate the relation between age, mass, radius and where possible luminosity, from the K-dwarf to the planet regime, in an age range where constraints on evolutionary models are currently very scarce. Any detection of an exoplanet in one of our youngest targets (<=10Myr) would also provide important constraints on planet formation and migration timescales and their relation to proto-planetary disc lifetimes. Finally, we will use the light curves of cluster members to study rotation and flaring in low-mass pre-main sequence stars. The present paper details the motivation, science goals and observing strategy of the survey. We present a method to estimate the sensitivity and number of detections expected in each cluster, using a simple semi-analytic approach which takes into account the characteristics of the cluster and photometric observations, using (tunable) best-guess assumptions for the incidence and parameter distribution of putative companions, and we incorporate the limits imposed by radial velocity follow-up from medium and large telescopes. We use these calculations to show that the survey as a whole can be expected to detect over 100 young low and very low mass eclipsing binaries, and approx. 3 transiting planets with radial velocity signatures detectable with currently available facilities.
Aigrain Suzanne
Favata Fabio
Hebb Leslie
Hodgkin Simon
Irwin Jonathan
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