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Tools for Discovering and Characterizing Extrasolar Planets 3 and Therefore Undersampled Sources Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 000, 000–000 (0000) Printed October 29, 2018 (MN LATEX style file v2.2) Tools for discovering and characterizing extrasolar planets Andr´as P´al1,2⋆ 1Department of Astronomy, Lor´and E¨otv¨os University, P´azm´any P. st. 1/A, Budapest H-1117, Hungary 2Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden street, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA October 29, 2018 ABSTRACT Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in the under- standing of the evolution and formation of planetary systems: from the observations of photometric transits, the interior structure of the planet and atmospheric proper- ties can also be constrained. The most efficient way to search for transiting extrasolar planets is based on wide-field surveys by hunting for short and shallow periodic dips in light curves covering quite long time intervals. These surveys monitor fields with several degrees in diameter and tens or hundreds of thousands of objects simultane- ously. In the practice of astronomical observations, surveys of large field-of-view are rather new and therefore require special methods for photometric data reduction that have not been used before. Since 2004, I participate in the HATNet project, one of the leading initiatives in the competitive search for transiting planets. Due to the lack of software solution which is capable to handle and properly reduce the yield of such a wide-field survey, I have started to develop a new package designed to perform the related data processing and analysis. After several years of improvement, the software package became sufficiently robust and played a key role in the discovery of several transiting planets. In addition, various new algorithms for data reduction had to be developed, implemented and tested which were relevant during the reduction and the interpretation of data. In this PhD thesis, I summarize my efforts related to the development of a complete software solution for high precision photometric reduction of astronomical images. I also demonstrate the role of this newly developed package and the related algorithms in the case of particular discoveries of the HATNet project. Key words: Methods: data analysis – Planetary systems – Techniques: photometric, spectroscopic, radial velocities arXiv:0906.3486v1 [astro-ph.IM] 18 Jun 2009 1 INTRODUCTION the presence of a short-period planet orbiting the Sun-like star 51 Peg. This detection was based on precise radial veloc- In the last two decades, the discovery and character- ity measurements with uncertainties at the level of meter per ization of extrasolar planets became an exciting field second. Both discovery methods mentioned above are based of astronomy. The first companion that was thought on the fact that all components in a single or multiple plan- to be an object roughly 10 times more massive than etary system, including the host star itself, revolve around Earth, had been detected around the pulsar PSR1829- the common barycenter, that is the point in the system hav- 10 (Bailes, Lyne & Shemar 1991). Although this detection ing inertial motion. Thus, companions with smaller masses turned out to be a false one (Lyne & Bailes 1992), shortly offset the barycenter only slightly from the host star whose after the method of detecting planetary companions in- motion is detected, either by the analysis of pulsar timing volving the analysis of pulsar timing variations led to the variations or by radial velocity measurements. Therefore, successful confirmation of the multiple planetary system such methods – which are otherwise fairly common among around PSR1257+12 (Wolszczan & Frail 1992). The pio- the investigation techniques of binary or multiple stellar sys- neering discovery of a planet orbiting a main sequence star tems – yielded success in the form of confirming planets only was announced by Mayor & Queloz (1995). They reported after the evolution of instrumentation. Due to the physical constraints found in these methods, the masses of the plan- ⋆ E-mail: apal@szofi.net c 0000 RAS 2 A. P´al ets can only be constrained by a lower limit, while we even 2007), the XO project (McCullough et al. 2005, 2006), do not have any information on the sizes of these objects. the Hungarian-made Automated Telescope project (HAT- The discovery of 51 Peg b was followed by numer- Net, Bakos et al. 2002, 2004), the Transatlantic Exoplanet ous other detections, mainly by the method of radial ve- Survey (TrES, Alonso et al. 2004), the Kilodegree Ex- locity analysis, yielding the discovery, for instance, of the tremely Little Telescope (KELT, Pepper, Gould & DePoy first planetary system with two planets around 47 UMa 2004; Pepper et al. 2007), and the Berlin Extrasolar Transit (Butler & Marcy 1996; Fischer et al. 2002), and the first Search project (BEST, Rauer et al. 2004). One should men- multiple planetary system around υ And (Butler et al. tion here the existing space-borne project, the CoRoT mis- 1999). Until the first photometric detection of planetary sion (Barge et al. 2008) and the Kepler mission, launched transits in the system of HD 209458(b) (Henry et al. 2000; successfully on 7 March 2009 (Borucki et al. 2007). Both Charbonneau et al. 2000), no radius estimations could be missions are dedicated (in part time) to searching for tran- given to the detected planets, and all of these had only siting extrasolar planets. As of March 2009, the above men- lower limits for their masses. Transiting planets provide the tioned projects announced 57 planets. 6 planets were found opportunity to characterize the size of the planet, and by by radial velocity surveys where transits were confirmed af- the known inclination of its orbit, one can derive the mass ter the detection of RV variations (GJ 436b, HD 149026b, of the planet without any ambiguity by combining the re- HD 17156b, HD 80606b, HD 189733b and HD 209458b), sults of transit photometry with the radial velocity mea- while the other 51 were discovered and announced by one surements. The planetary nature of HD 209458b was first of the above mentioned surveys. The CoRoT mission an- confirmed by the analysis of radial velocity variations alone. nounced 7 planets, for which 4 had published orbital and The first discovery based on photometric detection of pe- planetary data; the OGLE project reported data for 7 plan- riodic dips in light curves was the discovery of OGLE-TR- ets and an additional planet with existing photometry in 56b (Konacki et al. 2003). Since several scenarios can mimic the OGLE archive has also been confirmed by an inde- events that have similar light curves to transiting planets, pendent group (Snellen et al. 2008); the Transatlantic Ex- confirmation spectroscopy and subsequent analysis of radial oplanet Survey reported the discovery of 4 planets; the XO velocity data is still necessary to verify the planetary na- project has detected and confirmed 5 planets; the SWEEPS ture of objects found by transit searches (Queloz et al. 2001; project found 2 planets; the SuperWASP project announced Torres et al. 2005). 14+1 planets, however, 2 of them are known only from con- Since the first identification of planetary objects tran- ference announcements; and the HATNet project has 10 + 1 siting their parent stars, numerous additional systems have confirmed planets. The planet WASP-11/HAT-P-10b had a been discovered either by the detection of transits after shared discovery, it was confirmed independently by the Su- a confirmation based on radial velocity measurements or perWASP and HATNet groups (this common discovery has by searching transit-like signals in photometric time series been denoted earliet by the +1 term). The HATNet project and confirming the planetary nature with follow-up spec- also confirmed independently the planetary nature of the troscopic and radial velocity data. The former method led object XO-5b (P´al et al. 2008c). to the discovery of transits for many well-studied systems, All of the above mentioned wide-field surveys involve such as HD 189733 (planet transiting a nearby K dwarf; optical designs that yield a field-of-view of several degrees, Bouchy et al. 2005), GJ 436 (Butler et al. 2004), HD 17156 moreover, the KELT project monitors areas having a size of (Fischer et al. 2007; Barbieri et al. 2007) or HD 80606 (the thousand square degrees (hence the name, “Kilodegree Ex- transiting planet with the longest known orbital period of tremely Little Telescope”). The calibration and data reduc- 111 days; Naef et al. 2001; Moutou et al. 2009). These tion for such surveys revealed various problems that were not ∼ planets with transits confirmed later on are found around present on the image processing of “classical” data (obtained brighter stars since surveys for radial velocity variations by telescopes with fast focal ratios and therefore smaller mainly focus on these. However, the vast majority of the field-of-view). Some of the difficulties that occur are the fol- currently known transiting extrasolar planets have been de- lowing. Even the calibration frames themselves have to be tected by systematic photometric surveys, fully or partially filtered carefully, in order to avoid any significant structures dedicated for planet searches. Such projects monitor ei- (such as patches of clouds in the flat field images). Images ther faint targets using telescopes with small field-of-view taken by fast focal ratio optics have significant vignetting, or bright targets involving large field-of-view optical instru- therefore the calibration process should track its side effects, mentation. Some of the projects focused on the monitor- such as the variations in the signal-to-noise level across the ing of smaller fields are the Monitor project (Irwin et al.
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