K2 Warm Jupiters with the LCOGT TECH team

Shporer, A.; Bayliss, Daniel; Bento, Joao; Cochran, William D.; Colon, Knicole D.; Dragomir, Diana; Endl, Michael; Fulton, Benjamin James; Isaacson, Howard T.; Palle, E.; Siverd, Robert; Vanderburg, Andrew; Zhou, George; LCOGT TECH Team
Bibliographical reference

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #229, id.104.02

Advertised on:
1
2017
Number of authors
14
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
Many if not most transiting gas giant planets on short orbital periods (so called hot Jupiters) have larger radii than theoretically expected. Although several explanations have been proposed, none have completely solved this puzzle. As the number of known transiting planets grew a correlation was identified between gas giant radius and the stellar incident flux. Still, it is not clear whether this correlation is causation. Several questions remain and answering them will characterize in more detail this observed correlation and in turn the process responsible for the inflated radii, such as: Is the lack of inflated gas giants at longer periods a robust feature? What is the incident flux below which there are no inflated gas giants? How low in incident flux does this correlation stretch? These questions arise since there are only a small number of transiting gas giants with low incident flux, below about 108 erg/s/cm2, corresponding to orbital periods beyond 10 days around a Sun-like host star. We refer to such gas giant planets as warm Jupiters. Discovering and confirming more transiting warm Jupiters is the goal of this project, undertaken by the LCOGT Transiting Exoplanet CHaracterization (TECH) team. We are using K2 as our main source of transiting warm Jupiter candidates, with a few candidates discovered in each K2 campaign. LCOGT telescopes are being used for obtaining additional ground-based transit light curves, which are critical for confirming and refining the K2 transit ephemeris as outliers during ingress or egress of the few transit events observed by K2 can bias the measured ephemeris. Further ground-based follow-up data, including spectroscopy, radial velocities, and high angular resolution imaging, are obtained by facilities directly accessible by LCOGT TECH team members. In addition, LCOGT’s Network of Robotic Echelle Spectrographs (NRES) will be deployed during 2017 and will allow obtaining spectroscopy and radial velocities with LCOGT facilities. In addition to studying the inflated hot Jupiter conundrum, confirming a sample of warm Jupiters transiting bright stars will support extending atmospheric characterization and spin-orbit alignment studies beyond the hot Jupiter planet class.