Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Sep 2006
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006dps....38.0109h&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #38, #01.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 38, p.482
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We present results from our recently initiated Transit Light Curve (TLC) Project, a program of long-term monitoring of transiting extrasolar planets. The principal scientific goals of this project are: (1) to refine the estimates of the physical and orbital properties of these planets, and (2) to search for variations in the transit times (Holman and Murray 2005, Agol et al. 2005) and light curve shapes that indicate the presence of additional, perturbing planets (Miralda-Escude 2002). To date, we have observed transits of nine of the ten known transiting planets. To observe the bright northern hemisphere targets, we are using the KeplerCam on the 1.2-m telescope at the F.L. Whipple Observatory on Mt. Hopkins, AZ. For the fainter and southern hemisphere OGLE planets, we are using the Inamori Magellan Areal Camera and Spectrograph (IMACS) on the 6.5-m Magellan Baade telescope, and the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Magellan Instant Camera (MagIC) on the 6.5-m Magellan Clay telescope. In most cases, our photometry is accurate enough ( 1 mmag per minute of integration) that the resulting uncertainties in the planetary and stellar radii are dominated by the uncertainty in the assumed stellar mass, rather than by the statistical error. The noise in our KeplerCam photometry of XO-1b and TrES-1, in particular, is nearly Gaussian and time-averages down with the expected 1/sqrt(t) dependence all the way up to 30 minute time bins. This opens the possibility of detecting signals at the 0.1 mmag or even 0.01 mmag level, such as that produced by reflected light, by combining the results of many observations with small ground-based telescopes. Our transit timings for these systems are accurate to within 15 seconds.
Holman Matthew J.
Winn Joshua N.
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