Bibcode
Shporer, Avi; Bayliss, Daniel; Cochran, William D.; Colón, Knicole D.; Dragomir, Diana; Palle, E.; Potter, Stephen; Siverd, Robert; LCOGT TECH collaboration
Referencia bibliográfica
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #228, id.#201.05
Advertised on:
6
2016
Número de citas
0
Número de citas referidas
0
Descripción
Many 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
warm Jupiters 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 of
about 10 days and longer for a Sun-like host star. 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, once LCOGT’s
Network of Robotic Echelle Spectrographs (NRES) are deployed in the near
future they will allow obtaining spectroscopy and radial velocities with
LCOGT facilities. On top of 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.