Bibcode
Hebrard, Guillaume; Lecavelier Des Etangs, Alain; Desert, Jean-Michel; Ehrenreich, David; Diaz, Rodrigo; Moutou, Claire; Deeg, Hans; Bouchy, Francois; Deleuil, Magali; Vidal-Madjar, Alfred
Bibliographical reference
Spitzer Proposal ID #70031
Advertised on:
6
2010
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
CoRoT-9b is the first temperate transiting exoplanet. With a semi-major
axis of 0.41 AU on a quasi-circular orbit, this is the first transiting
planet far enough from its parent star to have an extended Hill sphere
(3.5 million kilometers in radius), as needed to form and sustain rings
and satellites. CoRoT-9b is thus the most promising planet known to date
to probe its nearby environment with an accurate transit light curve. Up
to 2014, there will be only two opportunities to observe a transit of
CoRoT-9b with Spitzer. We will observe the first one in June 2010 with
Spitzer. Here we propose to observe the second one, that will occur in
July 2011 during the Cycle 7. This new observation will increase the
probability for satellite detection and allow any detection of rings
based on the June-2010 transit to be confirmed. The Spitzer/IRAC light
curve will also allow the search for Transit Timing Variations
potentially due to additional bodies in this planetary system, as well
as a significant refinement of the system parameters together with the
photometric and spectroscopic ground-based campaign that we will
simultaneously conduct in July 2011. Observable CoRoT-9b transits being
extremely rare, opportunities should not be missed. The program we
propose here is the last chance to secure this transit observation
before year 2014.