Bibcode
Shporer, A.; Bayliss, Daniel; Bento, Joao; Cochran, William D.; Colon, Knicole D.; Dragomir, Diana; Endl, Michael; Fulton, Benjamin James; Isaacson, Howard T.; Palle, E.; Siverd, Robert; Vanderburg, Andrew; Zhou, George; LCOGT TECH Team
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #229, id.104.02
Advertised on:
1
2017
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
Many if not most transiting gas giant planets on short orbital periods
(so called hot Jupiters) have larger radii than theoretically expected.
Although several explanations have been proposed, none have completely
solved this puzzle. As the number of known transiting planets grew a
correlation was identified between gas giant radius and the stellar
incident flux. Still, it is not clear whether this correlation is
causation. Several questions remain and answering them will characterize
in more detail this observed correlation and in turn the process
responsible for the inflated radii, such as: Is the lack of inflated gas
giants at longer periods a robust feature? What is the incident flux
below which there are no inflated gas giants? How low in incident flux
does this correlation stretch? These questions arise since there are
only a small number of transiting gas giants with low incident flux,
below about 108 erg/s/cm2, corresponding to
orbital periods beyond 10 days around a Sun-like host star. We refer to
such gas giant planets as warm Jupiters. Discovering and confirming more
transiting warm Jupiters is the goal of this project, undertaken by the
LCOGT Transiting Exoplanet CHaracterization (TECH) team. We are using K2
as our main source of transiting warm Jupiter candidates, with a few
candidates discovered in each K2 campaign. LCOGT telescopes are being
used for obtaining additional ground-based transit light curves, which
are critical for confirming and refining the K2 transit ephemeris as
outliers during ingress or egress of the few transit events observed by
K2 can bias the measured ephemeris. Further ground-based follow-up data,
including spectroscopy, radial velocities, and high angular resolution
imaging, are obtained by facilities directly accessible by LCOGT TECH
team members. In addition, LCOGT’s Network of Robotic Echelle
Spectrographs (NRES) will be deployed during 2017 and will allow
obtaining spectroscopy and radial velocities with LCOGT facilities. In
addition to studying the inflated hot Jupiter conundrum, confirming a
sample of warm Jupiters transiting bright stars will support extending
atmospheric characterization and spin-orbit alignment studies beyond the
hot Jupiter planet class.