Bibcode
Murgas, F.; Pallé, E.; Cabrera-Lavers, A.; Colón, K. D.; Martín, E. L.; Parviainen, H.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 544, id.A41
Advertised on:
8
2012
Journal
Citations
29
Refereed citations
25
Description
Aims: The super-Earth planet GJ 1214b has recently been the focus
of several studies, which use the transit spectroscopy technique to
determine the nature of its atmosphere. Here, we focus on the Hα
line as a tool to further restrict the nature of GJ 1214b's atmosphere.
Methods: We used the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) OSIRIS
instrument to acquire narrow-band photometry with tunable filters. We
were able to observe the primary transit of the super-Earth GJ 1214 in
three bandpasses: two centered in the continuum around Hα (653.5
nm and 662.0 nm) and one centered at the line core (656.3 nm). We
measure the depth of the planetary transit at each wavelength interval.
Results: By fitting analytic models to the measured light curves,
we were able to compute the depth of the transit at the three
bandpasses. Taking the difference in the computed planet-to-star radius
ratio between the line and the comparison continuum filters, we find
Δ(Rp/R⋆)Hα - 653.5 =
(6.60 ± 3.54) × 10-3 and
Δ(Rp/R⋆)Hα - 662.0 =
(3.30 ± 3.61) × 10-3. Although the planet radius
is found to be larger in the Hα line than in the surrounding
continuum, the quality of our observations and the sigma level of the
differences (1.8 and 0.9, respectively) do not allow us to claim an
Hα excess in GJ 1214's atmosphere. Further observations will be
needed to resolve this issue.