Tuesday, April 17, 2012

1204.3135 (Diana Dragomir et al.)

Non-detection of transits of the super-Earth HD 97658b with MOST photometry    [PDF]

Diana Dragomir, Jaymie M. Matthews, Andrew W. Howard, Victoria Antoci, Gregory W. Henry, David B. Guenther, Rainer Kuschnig, Geoffrey W. Marcy, Anthony F. J. Moffat, Jason F. Rowe, Slavek M. Rucinski, Dimitar Sasselov, Werner W. Weiss
The radial velocity-discovered exoplanet HD 97658b was recently announced to transit, with a derived planetary radius of 2.93 $\pm$ 0.28 R$_{\oplus}$. As a transiting super-Earth orbiting a bright star, this planet would make an attractive candidate for additional observations, including studies of its atmospheric properties. We present and analyze follow-up photometric observations of the HD 97658 system acquired with the MOST space telescope. Our results show no transit with the depth and ephemeris reported in the announcement paper. For the same ephemeris, we rule out transits for a planet with radius larger than 1.87 R$_{\oplus}$. We also report new radial velocity measurements which continue to support the existence of an exoplanet with a period of 9.5 days, and obtain improved orbital parameters.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.3135

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