LANL Preprint: Status and Prospects of Planetary Transit Searches: Hot Jupiters Galore

From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Tue Feb 11 2003 - 07:46:40 MST

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    http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0301249

    Astrophysics, abstract
    astro-ph/0301249

    From: Keith Horne <kdh1@st-andrews.ac.uk>
    Date (v1): Tue, 14 Jan 2003 11:04:29 GMT (37kb)
    Date (revised v2): Sat, 8 Feb 2003 00:12:41 GMT (37kb)

    Status and Prospects of Planetary Transit Searches: Hot Jupiters Galore

    Authors: Keith Horne
    Comments: To appear in: Scientific Frontiers in Research on Extrasolar
    Planets, 18-21 Jun 2002, Washington D.C., ASP Conference Series Vol ???,
    2003, D.Deming and S.Seager, eds v2: update notes ogle-tr-56b discovery

          The first transiting extrasolar planet, orbiting HD209458, was a
          Doppler wobble planet before its transits were discovered with a
          10 cm CCD camera. Wide-angle CCD cameras, by monitoring in
          parallel the light curves of tens of thousands of stars, should
          find hot Jupiter transits much faster than the Doppler wobble
          method. The discovery rate could easily rise by a factor 10. The
          sky holds perhaps 1000 hot Jupiters transiting stars brighter than
          V=13. These are bright enough for follow-up radial velocity
          studies to measure planet masses to go along with the radii from
          the transit light curves. I derive scaling laws for the discovery
          potential of ground-based transit searches, and use these to
          assess over two dozen planetary transit surveys currently
          underway. The main challenge lies in calibrating small systematic
          errors that limit the accuracy of CCD photometry at
          milli-magnitude levels. Promising transit candidates have been
          reported by several groups, and many more are sure to follow.

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