P14: Exoplanet Transit

Observing Goals:

You should observe the transit of an exoplanet – measuring the change in brightness of a star, at the highest signal to noise possible, to see the effect of an exoplanet passing in front of the stars disk. Useful Background and References:

• To locate potential transits: https://astro.swarthmore.edu/transits/transits.cgi

Observation Planning:

• Observation Time

  • You will be observing a HALF night. You will share your data with another group observing the other half of the night.

• Target Selection

  • You should select an appropriate transit within your observing time frame that has a bright enough host star, and a big enough dip in brightness, to be detectable in your observations.

  • Make sure you have a finder chart so you know which is your star of interest in the field, and also record the predicted times of the exoplanet transit.

• Observations

  • You should maximise the signal-to-noise in your observations, using a large amount of binning and the broadest possible filter (lum), with fairly long exposure times.

  • If your star is too faint, make sure you use the tracker for prologned exposures.

  • You should make sure to have a great set of calibration frames to remove any image artefacts. You should take observations of standard star fields so that you are able to calibrate the magnitudes that you observe.

Data Analysis:

• Data Reduction Basic Steps

  • NOTE: this project is doable. With proper data reduction a transit is visible. Read a report about conducting a sucesssful transit observation

  • Visit the page Data Reduction Cheat Sheet

  • It is very important that you do the best possible job in producing calibration frames to remove any and all systematic effects.

• Further for this project

  • When your data are reduced, you should align the images, and then perform photometry on each image

  • Use a set of reference stars in your image to calibrate the brightness of each frame

  • Use standard star fields to calibrate the overall brightnesses recorded

  • Measure the change in brightness of your target start during the course of the exoplanet transit

• Further Analysis for this project

  • Look at the shape of the transit curve compared to expectations for a transiting planet

Results:

Can you answer these questions with your work?

• Q1: Were you able to detect the exoplanet transit? If not, can you provide evidence that it was beyond the limits of your observations?

• Q2: Did the transit of the exoplanet match your expectations?

• Q3: What limits are put on exoplanet transits that could be observed using our telescope?

Presenting your results:

• A1. Preparing a Scientific Poster

• A2. Preparing a Scientific Talk