Small Telescope Exoplanet Transit Surveys: XO

Crouzet, N.
Bibliographical reference

Handbook of Exoplanets, ISBN 978-3-319-55332-0. Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature, 2018, id.129

Advertised on:
2018
Number of authors
1
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
4
Refereed citations
4
Description
The XO project aims at detecting transiting exoplanets around bright stars from the ground using small telescopes. The original configuration of XO (McCullough et al. 2005) has been changed and extended as described here. The instrumental setup consists of three identical units located at different sites, each composed of two lenses equipped with CCD cameras mounted on the same mount. We observed two strips of the sky covering an area of 520∘2 for twice nine months. We build lightcurves for ˜20,000 stars up to magnitude R ≈ 12.5 using a custom-made photometric data reduction pipeline. The photometric precision is around 1-2% for most stars, and the large quantity of data allows us to reach a millimagnitude precision when folding the lightcurves on timescales that are relevant to exoplanetary transits. We search for periodic signals and identify several hundreds of variable stars and a few tens of transiting planet candidates. Follow-up observations are underway to confirm or reject these candidates. We found two close-in gas giant planets so far, in line with the expected yield.
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Exoplanets and Astrobiology

The search for life in the universe has been driven by recent discoveries of planets around other stars (known as exoplanets), becoming one of the most active fields in modern astrophysics. The growing number of new exoplanets discovered in recent years and the recent advance on the study of their atmospheres are not only providing new valuable

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