Name:COMP_FILT
Description:Grid-based Analysis of Simulated Light Curves to Test Planetary Transit
Detection Methods.
Abstract:The detection of extrasolar planets by means of the transit method is a rapidly growing field of modern astrophysics. The periodic light dips produced by the passage of a planet in front of its parent star can be used to reveal the presence of the planet itself, to measure its orbital period and relative radius, as well as to perform studies on the outer layers of the planet by analyzing the light of the star passing through the planet\’s atmosphere. We have developed a new technique, called 3-spot model, to detect transits by objects with a size comparable to that of our Earth in front of a solar-like star. Our technique exploits a physical model of solar-like variability to reduce the impact of stellar intrinsic flux variations on the detection of transits. Tens of thousands light curves for different values of the radius and the orbital period of the planet and for different photometric accuracy, as expected for the space experiments CoRoT and Kepler, have been simulated to test the performance of our method and compare it with that of other methods proposed to filter or fit out stellar variability. The results show the advantage of the new method when the transit dips have amplitude smaller than the standard deviation of the noise of the photometric measurements.^
Created:2010-05-01
Last updated:2010-05-01
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