Bibcode
Tingley, B.
Referencia bibliográfica
Astronomy and Astrophysics, v.425, p.1125-1131 (2004)
Fecha de publicación:
10
2004
Revista
Número de citas
40
Número de citas referidas
33
Descripción
The radial velocity technique is currently used to classify transiting
objects. While capable of identifying grazing binary eclipses, this
technique cannot reliably identify blends, a chance overlap of a faint
background eclipsing binary with an ordinary foreground star. Blends
generally have no observable radial velocity shifts, as the foreground
star is brighter by several magnitudes and therefore dominates the
spectrum, but their combined light can produce events that closely
resemble those produced by transiting exoplanets. The radial velocity
technique takes advantage of the mass difference between planets and
stars to classify exoplanet candidates. However, the existence of blends
renders this difference an unreliable discriminator. Another difference
must therefore be utilized for this classification - the physical size
of the transiting body. Due to the dependence of limb darkening on
color, planets and stars produce subtly different transit shapes. These
differences can be relatively weak, little more than 1/10th the transit
depth. However, the presence of even small color differences between the
individual components of the blend increases this difference. This paper
shows that this color difference is capable of discriminating between
exoplanets and blends reliably, theoretically capable of classifying
even terrestrial-class transits, unlike the radial velocity technique.