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Behind the Scenes of the Discovery of Two Extrasolar Planets: ESO Large Programme 666

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Behind the Scenes of the Discovery of Two Extrasolar Planets: ESO Large Programme 666 Astronomical Science Behind the Scenes of the Discovery of Two Extrasolar Planets: ESO Large Programme 666 Dante Minniti 1, 2 ets and brown dwarfs), and to measure The telescopes and instruments Claudio Melo3 their masses, radii, and mean densities. Dominique Naef 3 We hunt selected OGLE transit candi- We use the Very Large Telescope UT2 Andrzej Udalski 4,5 dates using spectroscopy and photom- in order to measure radial velocities, and Frédéric Pont 6 etry in the ‘twilight zone’, stretching UT1 and 2 for photometry in order to Claire Moutou 7 the limits of what is nowadays possible measure the transits. Most of the spec- Nuno Santos 8 with the VLT. troscopic observations required real-time Didier Queloz 6 decisions to be taken and therefore were Tsevi Mazeh 9 made in visitor mode, whereas photom- Michel Gillon 6 The programme etry collected at precise transit times was Michel Mayor 6 carried out in service mode by expert Stephane Udry 6 Transiting extrasolar planets are essential mountain personnel. Rodrigo Diaz10 to our understanding of planetary struc- Sergio Hoyer11 ture, formation and evolution outside the The spectroscopic runs were done with Sebastian Ramirez1 Solar System. The observation of transits FLAMES in GIRAFFE mode which allows Grzegorz Pietrzynski 4,12 and secondary eclipses gives access to simultaneously more than 100 stars to Wolfgang Gieren12 such quantities as a planet’s true mass, be observed at resolutions ranging from Maria Teresa Ruiz11 radius, density, surface temperature and about 5 000 to 20 000. At the same time, Manuela Zoccali1 atmospheric spectrum. the other seven to eight fibres feed UVES Omer Tamuz 9 at the other Nasmyth focus of the tele- Abi Shporer 9 The OGLE search for transiting planets scope, collecting spectra with a resolu- Marcin Kubiak 4,5 and low-mass stellar companions has tion of 50 000. Both GIRAFFE and UVES Igor Soszynski 4,5 been the first photometric transit survey allow us to acquire spectra of a compari- Olaf Szewczyk 4,5 to yield results. Follow-up of existing son lamp simultaneously with the target Michal Szymanski 4,5 OGLE low-amplitude transit candidates observations. The lamp spectrum is used Krzysztof Ulaczyk 4,5 prior to our Large Programme has un - afterwards to correct spectrograph shifts. Lukasz Wyrzykowski 5,13 covered five extrasolar planets and has This is essential in order to be able to yielded the measurement of their radii measure radial velocity with a precision of and therefore their densities. Despite a few m/s. Accurate radial velocity meas- 1 Departamento de Astronomía y these successes, many important points urements require high-resolution spectra, Astrofísica, Pontificia Universidad remain to be understood: how hot Jupi- for this reason we placed the best can- Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile ters form, how they evolve, what is the didates in the UVES fibres in order to 2 Specola Vaticana, Città del Vaticano, frequency of hot Jupiters, why the density measure more accurate velocities. The Italy range of hot Jupiters is so large, etc. The photometric runs were acquired with 3 ESO main difficulty in answering these ques- FORS1 or FORS2, yielding milli-magni- 4 Warsaw University Observatory, Poland tions is the limited number of transiting tude photometry and a high-quality light 5 The OGLE Team planets detected so far. curve, essential to derive accurate physi- 6 Observatoire de Genève, Sauverny, cal parameters for the transiting planets. Switzerland Our Large Programme 177.C-0666 7 Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de (LP666 for short) proposed to enlarge Marseille, France this sample of confirmed OGLE extra- The team preparations 8 Centro de Astrofísica, Universidade do solar planets, and also to populate the Porto, Portugal mass-radius diagram for low-mass ob- Three teams were competing for the 9 School of Physics and Astronomy, jects, including planets, brown dwarfs same resources: the OGLE team, the R. and B. Sackler Faculty of Exact and late M-type stars. 177 transiting can- Geneva team, and the Chilean team. The Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Israel didates from the OGLE survey had been idea arose of working together and the 10 Instituto de Astronomía y Física del published when we started this LP666, final details were discussed at the work- Espacio, Buenos Aires, Argentina and as part of this programme three new shop in Haute-Provence “10 years of 11 Departmento de Astronomía, OGLE seasons produced 62 new candi- 51 Peg”. In preparation for this Large Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile dates. Programme, we had to re-examine the 12 Departamento de Astronomía, OGLE database to check old candidates Universidad de Concepción, Chile We used VLT+FLAMES to obtain radial and improve the ephemeris, and to run 13 Institute of Astronomy, University of velocity orbits in order to measure the OGLE pipelines to select new can- Cambridge, United Kingdom the mass of all interesting OGLE transit- didates. Our teams have put together ing candidates, and also VLT+UVES their respective spectroscopic and pho- and VLT+FORS to measure their precise tometric databases in order to select the This is the story of the Large Pro- radius from high-resolution spectroscopy most promising candidates, but it was gramme 666, dedicated to discover of the primary and high-definition transit not easy to decide which were these best sub-stellar objects (extrasolar plan - light curves. candidates, and this was extensively dis- The Messenger 133 – September 2008 21 Astronomical Science Minniti D. et al., ESO Large Programme 666 cussed by many team members. The (2005) for Carina, and Bouchy et al. can didates from season VI (up to OGLE- spectroscopic run of February 2006 by (2005) for the Galactic Bulge. In addition, TR-238) are still being analysed. the Swiss team was used to cull some the flexibility of the OGLE telescope candidates. The photometric run of the has allowed us to obtain the candidates The spectroscopic runs had two goals: last period of March 2006 of the Chilean needed, producing a new set of candi- (1) to sort out the non-planetary can- team was used to observe some of dates for this LP666, which we have fol- didates; and (2) to measure an orbital these most promising candidates. We lowed-up during periods P78–P82. These motion for the planetary candidates. The finally started the planet hunting for were selected carefully among periodic need to discard as quickly as possible this Large Programme in April 2006 with low-amplitude transits observed with the impostors required that data reduc- many promising candidates. the Warsaw telescope during the last tion and radial velocity measurement had seasons: season IV from candidates to be done in real time. This was achieved The first step is to acquire radial-velocity OGLE-TR-178 to TR-200; and season V by a combination of the FLAMES/UVES information for the most promising OGLE from candidates OGLE-TR-201 to pipeline and our own code. The previous planetary transit candidates, and to iden- TR-219. These are listed in Table 1. New nights results were analysed by our team tify real transiting planets among them. This requires five to eight radial velocity points with UVES in good observing con- Object Period I Depth Status ditions. As the OGLE candidates are dis- OGLE-TR-178 2.97115 16.56 0.016 faint target, not observed posed in a few square degrees of the sky, OGLE-TR-179 12.67106 15.13 0.034 flat CCF a few of them (typically two to five targets) OGLE-TR-180 1.99601 16.74 0.012 faint target, not observed can be observed simultaneously using OGLE-TR-181 2.3896 16.29 0.01 fast rotator (synch.?) the FLAMES configuration. The weather OGLE-TR-182 3.98105 15.86 0.01 transiting planet conditions of this first run were rather OGLE-TR-183 4.78217 15.32 0.015 fast rotator (synch.?) poor, with five clouded nights and three OGLE-TR-184 4.92005 15.57 0.015 fast rotator (synch.?) clear nights. As our targets are faint and OGLE-TR-185 2.78427 16.72 0.035 fast rotator (synch.?) we need < 100 m/s radial velocity accu- OGLE-TR-186 14.81481 16.54 0.054 faint target, not observed racy, the clouded nights were of very lim- OGLE-TR-187 3.45686 14.07 0.008 double-lined spectroscopic binary (SB2) ited use, despite the occasional gaps in OGLE-TR-188 6.87663 16.38 0.031 blend of two line systems the clouds. OGLE-TR-189 1.73937 15.03 0.006 not observed OGLE-TR-190 9.38262 16.06 0.043 not observed This Large Programme had another com- OGLE-TR-191 2.51946 15.57 0.007 fast rotator (synch.?) ponent, many hours of service observa- OGLE-TR-192 5.42388 14.41 0.008 flat CCF tions on FORS to obtain high-accuracy OGLE-TR-193 2.95081 14.99 0.008 not observed measurements of the transits of the plan- OGLE-TR-194 1.59492 14.69 0.006 flat CCF ets that we expected to discover. In fact, OGLE-TR-195 3.62174 14.19 0.006 not obseved the results of these initial runs suggested OGLE-TR-196 2.1554 15.57 0.012 fast rotator (synch.?) three possible planets, but because of OGLE-TR-197 2.40587 14.59 0.019 flat CCF bad weather we could not reach solid OGLE-TR-198 13.63141 15.44 0.018 not observed conclusions on these objects. Due to the OGLE-TR-199 8.8347 14.88 0.017 single-lined spectroscopic binary (SB1) bad weather, it was more important OGLE-TR-200 6.48845 15.63 0.023 not observed at this initial stage to recover some of the OGLE-TR-201 2.368 15.6 0.016 fast rotator spectroscopic time that was lost.
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