Hubble Space Telescope Time-Series Photometry of the Transiting Planet of HD 209458

By T. Brown, D. Charbonneau, R. Gilliland, R. W. Noyes, Adam Burrows. 2001

499 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have observed four transits of the planet of HD 209458 using the STIS spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Summing the recorded counts over wavelength between 582 and 638 nm yields a photometric time series with 80 s time sampling and relative precision of about 1.1 × 10-4 per sample. The folded light curve can be fitted within observational errors using a model consisting of an opaque circular planet transiting a limb-darkened stellar disk. In this way we estimate the planetary radius Rp = 1.347 ± 0.060 RJup, the orbital inclination i = 86.°6 ± 0.°14, the stellar radius R* = 1.146 ± 0.050 R☉, and one parameter describing the stellar limb darkening. Our estimated radius is smaller than those from earlier studies but is consistent within measurement errors and also with theoretical estimates of the radii of irradiated Jupiter-like planets. Satellites or rings orbiting the planet would, if large enough, be apparent from distortions of the light curve or from irregularities in the transit timings. We find no evidence for either satellites or rings, with upper limits on satellite radius and mass of 1.2 R⊕ and 3 M⊕, respectively. Opaque rings, if present, must be smaller than 1.8 planetary radii in radial extent. The high level of photometric precision attained in this experiment confirms the feasibility of photometric detection of Earth-sized planets circling Sun-like stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e8948f68553e6fd5a918180b40a7e8db20f1ffe

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Jon Fortney
2. D. Charbonneau
3. J. Southworth
4. N. Madhusudhan
5. Sara Seager
6. A. Showman
7. J. Winn
8. M. Marley

In Instrumentation

1. Jon Fortney
2. J. Southworth
3. D. Charbonneau
4. J. Winn
5. Sara Seager
6. N. Madhusudhan
7. A. Showman
8. M. Marley

Citations in the corpus

• DISEQUILIBRIUM CARBON, OXYGEN, AND NITROGEN CHEMISTRY IN THE ATMOSPHERES OF HD 189733b AND HD 209458b (2011, background): “…for inferring properties of both the planet and its host star (e.g., Charbonneau et al. 2000, 2002, 2005; Henry et al. 2000; Seager & Sasselov 2000; Brown 2001; Brown et al. 2001; Burrows et al. 2001; Hubbard et al. 2001; Deming et al. 2005b; Knutson et al. 2007, 2009; Madhusudhan & Seager 2009).”
• Using Stellar Limb-Darkening to Refine the Properties of HD 209458b (2006, methodology): “We compare our TC with the results of Brown et al. (2001) repeating our fit using the first transit in our data set as our initial transit time, and find TC ¼ 2;451;659:936739 0:000087 HJD.”
• The Impact of Solar-like Variability on the Detectability of Transiting Terrestrial Planets (2002, methodology): “…observations of transits of 209458b with HST’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) instrument produced an absolute photometric data set with sufficient precision to have detected an Earthsized moon orbiting the inflated Jovian planet in that system if one were present (Brown et al. 2001).”
• Orbital Perturbations of Transiting Planets: A Possible Method to Measure Stellar Quadrupoles and to Detect Earth-Mass Planets (2001, methodology): “As discussed by Brown et al. (2001), the determination of transit lightcurves of such high precision opens up many opportunities for detecting other phenomena that could induce small changes in the lightcurve, such as the presence of satellites or rings around the planet.”
• Stability of Satellites around Close-in Extrasolar Giant Planets (2002, methodology): “By plugging the resulting value for ap into Equation 8, we can exclude Earth-like moons around planets in systems that don’t satisfy the inequality Mp ≥ [ 39 4 ( f3 3 )−13/6 Mmk2pTR 5 p √ G Qp ]3/8 M 273/64 ⊙ M 221/64 ∗ ( a2⊕ F⊕ F )−39/ (15) Equation 15 is plotted in Figure 3 for the same values of ”
• Ground-based detection of sodium in the transmission spectrum of exoplanet HD209458b (2008, methodology): “A least-squares fit was performed on the data using as a model a scaled version of the HST light curve as presented by Brown et al. (2001).”
• A time-dependent radiative model of HD 209458b (2004, background): “Models of the star imply that its radius is R = 92 200–109 000 km (about 40% more than Jupiter) for a mass M = 0.69 ± 0.02 MJ (Brown et al. 2001; Cody & Sasselov 2002).”
• DHP Framework: Digital Health Passports Using Blockchain - Use case on international tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic (2004, methodology): “A moon or ring system may transit before the planet causing a shallower transit to appear earlier or later than it would without the moon (Brown et al. 2001; Schneider 2003; Barnes & Fortney 2004).”
• Periodic Flux Variability of Stars due to the Reflex Doppler Effect Induced by Planetary Companions (2003, background): “…3 See http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/planets/catalog, for a list of planets and discovery references. tions of several transits allowed the exquisite measurement of these planetary properties, as well as the detection of sodium lines in its atmosphere (Brown et al. 2001; Charbonneau et al. 2002).”
• A Gaussian process framework for modelling instrumental systematics: application to transmission spectroscopy (2011, unknown): “E P] 2 8 Se p e.g. Brown et al. 2001; Gilliland & Arribas 2003; Pont et al. 2007).”
• OBLIQUITIES OF HOT JUPITER HOST STARS: EVIDENCE FOR TIDAL INTERACTIONS AND PRIMORDIAL MISALIGNMENTS (2012, methodology): “We also used the HST light curve obtained by Brown et al. (2001) to obtain photometric priors, and used the vsin i? value from Laughlin et al. (2005) as a prior.”
• A Unique Solution of Planet and Star Parameters from an Extrasolar Planet Transit Light Curve (2002, background): “…planets are possible, such as atmosphere transmission spectroscopy (note the first extrasolar planet atmosphere detection by Charbonneau et al. 2002), search for moons and rings (Brown et al. 2001), and detection of oblateness and the corresponding constraint on rotation rate (Seager & Hui 2002).”
• Spitzer Transit and Secondary Eclipse Photometry of GJ 436b (2007, background): “Fitting to high-precision transit photometry requires a determination, or assumption, of the stellar mass (Brown et al. 2001).”
• Analytic Light Curves for Planetary Transit Searches (2002, methodology): “The data require an accurate description of limb-darkening as demonstrated by Hubble Space Telescope observations of HD 209458 of such high quality that a quadratic limb-darkening law was needed to fit the transit lightcurve rather than the usual linear limb-darkening law (Brown et al. 2001).”
• Improving the Efficiency of Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Analyzing the Orbits of Extrasolar Planets (2005, background): “HD 209458 The transiting planet around HD 209458 has provoked considerable interest on account of its large radius (Brown et al. 2001).”
• Sodium Absorption from the Exoplanetary Atmosphere of HD 189733b Detected in the Optical Transmission Spectrum (2007, background): “Since we are dealing with a narrow spectral window, and the spectra are normalized by the adjacent continuum, these observations are not sensitive to the broadband color dependency expected due to limb-darkening (Brown et al. 2001; Ballester et al. 2007).”
• Tidal Dissipation in Rotating Giant Planets (2003, background): “The dissipation of inertial waves in the convective region provides a deep source of heating that can inflate the planet, as may have been observed in the case of the transiting planet HD 209458b (Brown et al. 2001).”
• Evolution of "51 Pegasus b-like" planets (2002, unknown): “Hubble Space Telescope measurements of the transit (Brown et al. 2001) imply that the planet’s radius is 96 300 (cid:6) 4000km.”