Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2010-04-21
Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc., 2010, Volume 408, Issue 3, pp. 1758-1769
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Submitted to MNRAS, 8 pages, 2 figures
Scientific paper
We explore how finite integration times or equivalently temporal binning induces morphological distortions to the transit lightcurve. These distortions, if uncorrected for, lead to the retrieval of erroneous system parameters and may even lead to some planetary candidates being rejected as ostensibly unphysical. We provide analytic expressions for estimating the disturbance to the various lightcurve parameters as a function of the integration time. These effects are particularly crucial in light of the long-cadence photometry often used for discovering new exoplanets by for example CoRoT and the Kepler Mission (8.5 and 30 minutes). One of the dominant effects of long integration times is a systematic underestimation of the lightcurve derived stellar density, which has significant ramifications for transit surveys. We present a discussion of numerical integration techniques to compensate for the effects and produce expressions to quickly estimate the errors of such techniques, as a function of integration time and numerical resolution. This allows for an economic choice of resolution before attempting fits of long-cadence lightcurves.
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