Testing the Accuracy of Ground-Based Transit Timing Observations and Their Uncertainties

Details Testing the Accuracy of Ground-Based Transit Timing Observations and Their Uncertainties Testing the Accuracy of Ground-Based Transit Timing Observations and Their Uncertainties

Jan 2012

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21924508g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #245.08

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

Observations of known transiting exoplanets may help reveal the presence of additional planets in the system, since additional bodies may introduce transit timing variations, or deviations from a strict periodicity of the transits. Many systems have been monitored for this effect; Kepler has clearly detected them in some systems, and there are some tentative detections in the literature using ground-based transit observations. However, the significance of these ground-based detections rests on the question of whether or not the uncertainties on the transit timing measurements are accurate. Gauging the accuracy of transit timing uncertainties is difficult in practice, since successive transits of the same system will not necessarily show the same timing variation, and since it is difficult to know for sure that a given system does not have any intrinsic timing variations. We have begun an observational program to characterize transit timing uncertainties by comparing simultaneous observations of a given transit taken with multiple telescopes. Any pair of observations of a given transit should yield the same transit midpoint, within the uncertainties, if those uncertainties are appropriate for the data. We report on our observational program, and on initial analysis of several pairs of transits. The transits were fit using the Transit Analysis Package (TAP) (Gazak et al. 2011) and JKTEBOP (Southworth et al. 2004) codes. Preliminary analysis suggests that accounting for correlated or "red” noise in the fits is essential, as fits assuming only random errors yield error bars that are systematically too small.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of National Science Foundation grant AST-0721386.

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