Praveen Kundurthy, Rory Barnes, Andrew C. Becker, Eric Agol, Benjamin F. Williams, Noel Gorelick, Amy Rose
The Apache Point Survey of Transit Lightcurves of Exoplanets (APOSTLE) observed 10 transits of XO-2b over a period of three years. We present measurements which confirm previous estimates of system parameters like the normalized semi-major axis (a/R_{*}), stellar density (\rho_{*}), impact parameter (b) and orbital inclination (i_{orb}). Our errors on system parameters like a/R_{*} and \rho_{*} have improved by ~40% compared to previous best ground-based measurements. Our study of the transit times show no evidence for transit timing variations and we are able to rule out co-planar companions with masses \ge 0.20 \mearth\ in low order mean motion resonance with XO-2b. We also explored the stability of the XO-2 system given various orbital configurations of a hypothetical planet near the 2:1 mean motion resonance. We find that a wide range of orbits (including Earth-mass perturbers) are both dynamically stable and produce observable TTVs. We find that up to 51% of our stable simulations show TTVs that are smaller than the typical transit timing errors (~20 sec) measured for XO-2b, and hence remain undetectable.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.5713
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