Introduction of MuSCAT for exoplanet studies and its initial results

Authors
Dr.
Norio Narita
Dr.
Akihiko Fukui
Date and time
31 Mar 2016 - 10:30 Europe/London
Address

Aula

Talk language
English
Slides language
English
Serie number
1
Description

NASA's Kepler mission has made a revolution in discovering a large number of transiting exoplanets. Moreover K2, TESS, and PLATO will provide more transiting exoplanets in the near future. For such transit surveys, it is critically important to exclude contaminations of false positives, especially caused by eclipsing binaries, before using precious observing times of large telescopes. For this reason, we focused attention on using small-medium (1-2 m class) telescopes which are easier to obtain substantial amount of observing times. We developed MuSCAT, a multi-color simultaneous camera, for 188cm telescope at Okayama Astrophysical Observatory of Japan. I will introduce our motivation for the development of MuSCAT as well as its capability and initial results.

The multi-band imager MuSCAT, mounted on the 188cm telescope at Okayama Astrophysical Observatory, is designed to study transiting exoplanets through high-precision multi-band transit photometry.

In my talk, I will present the ability and limitation of the current MuSCAT based on a pilot observation for a bright (V=10) star.
I will also discuss prospects for the next version of MuSCAT for the 1.5m TCS telescope.