Bibcode
Challener, Ryan C.; Harrington, Joseph; Jenkins, James; Kurtovic, Nicolás T.; Ramirez, Ricardo; Peña Zamudio, José; McIntyre, Kathleen J.; Himes, Michael D.; Rodríguez, Eloy; Anglada-Escudé, Guillem; Dreizler, Stefan; Ofir, Aviv; Ribas, Ignasi; Rojo, Patricio; Kipping, David; Butler, R. Paul; Amado, Pedro J.; Rodríguez-López, Cristina; Kempton, Eliza M.; Palle, Enric; Murgas, Felipe
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #50, id.405.10
Advertised on:
10
2018
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
After the discovery of Proxima Centauri b in 2016, we observed the
system with the Spitzer Space Telescope to look for transits. We
confirmed that the planet does not transit. However, we observed three
asymmetric, periodic, comet-like events. Unfortunately, we now
understand these events to be systematic effects due to telescope
vibration, which is occasionally temporally resolved with our 0.02
second frame time. This systematic has been previously identified as a
spike in the number of pixels significantly contributing to photometry,
but that metric can be misleading. We show that coherent, high-frequency
activity in the point-spread function area, measured several ways, is
more indicative of this systematic, and that the effect can be partially
removed by a quadratic model dependent on point-spread function width.
This systematic occurs at an exoplanet-signal level three times in our
80 hours, and more frequently at a lower level, which has implications
for transits and eclipses of small and cool planets, respectively.
Spitzer is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California
Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. This work was
supported by NASA Planetary Atmospheres grant NNX12AI69G and NASA
Astrophysics Data Analysis Program grant NNX13AF38G.