event
Wednesday 01 Feb 2012: Transiting Exoplanet survey developments and Transmission Photometry of inflated Hot-Jupiters
Joao Bento - University of Warwick
Physics, 4th floor 14:00-14:45
Ground-based transiting exoplanet surveys have revolutionised the field over the last 10 years. In particular, projects such as the SuperWASP, HATNet and MEarth have shown that it is possible to find large numbers of planets using relatively inexpensive off-the-shelf equipment.
In this talk I will be outlining my contributions to the SuperWASP project, focusing on understanding sources of systematic noise in the instrument with the aim of improving the photometry. I will also speak about the Next Generation Transit Survey, a new transiting exoplanet survey that has recently secured full funding and authorisation to be commissioned at ESO's Paranal Observatory.
Finally, I will describe a running effort to perform transmission photometry of inflated Hot-Jupiters during transit using the multi-band fast photometer ULTRACAM. The purpose of this study is to detect the variation of the transit depth between observations at different wavelengths from which the presence of specific molecules in the upper atmospheres can be inferred. In particular, I will show data from several observations of WASP-15b and WASP-17b using this instrument on ESO's NTT telescope.
