Expected Detection and False Alarm Rates for Transiting Jovian Planets

By T. Brown. 2003

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ground-based searches for transiting Jupiter-sized planets have so far produced few detections of planets but many of stellar systems with eclipse depths, durations, and orbital periods that resemble those expected from planets. The detection rates prove to be consistent with our present knowledge of binary and multiple-star systems and of Jovian-mass extrasolar planets. Space-based searches for transiting Earth-sized planets will be largely unaffected by the false alarm sources that afflict ground-based searches, except for distant eclipsing binaries whose light is strongly diluted by that of a foreground star. A by-product of the rate estimation is evidence that the period distribution of extrasolar planets is depressed for periods between 5 and 200 days.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64b1c0429a290291c297fae8acde96542b781aeb

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• LOW FALSE POSITIVE RATE OF KEPLER CANDIDATES ESTIMATED FROM A COMBINATION OF SPITZER AND FOLLOW-UP OBSERVATIONS (2015, background): “We do not expect all the signals to be due to planets: many astrophysical phenomena can reproduce a similar lightcurve to that of a transiting planet (Brown 2003).”
• Wide‐Field Millimagnitude Photometry with the HAT: A Tool for Extrasolar Planet Detection (2004, background): “While this has given rise to some skepticism about whether they will ever bear fruit, this skepticism is unwarranted; it is simply the case that earlier projections of the detection rate (e.g., Horne 2003) were overly optimistic—perhaps by as much as a factor of 10 (Brown 2003).”
• HAT-P-7b: An Extremely Hot Massive Planet Transiting a Bright Star in the Kepler Field (2008, background): “…(DS, see Latham 1992) at the FLWO 1.5 m Tillinghast reflector, in order to rule out a number of blend scenarios that mimic planetary transits (e.g. Brown 2003; O’Donovan et al. 2007), as well as to characterize the stellar parameters, such as surface gravity, effective temperature, and rotation.”
• Identification of Background False Positives from Kepler Data (2013, background): “Brown (2003) distinguishes 12 combinations of giant planets and stars in eclipsing and transiting systems that can produce light curves mimicking a planet transiting a solitary primary star.”
• Rejecting Astrophysical False Positives from the TrES Transiting Planet Survey: The Example of GSC 03885–00829 (2006, background): “For example, Brown (2003) predicts that for every 25,000 stars observed, we will find 10 false positives and only one true transiting planet.”
• The effect of red noise on planetary transit detection (2006, background): “For transit depths below ∼2 per cent, the odds become more favourable to transiting planets (Brown 2003), but since such transit depths are near the detection threshold of most ground-based surveys, false positive detections start being a source of contamination.”
• SOPHIE velocimetry of Kepler transit candidates XVII. The physical properties of giant exoplanets within 400 days of period (2015, background): “Those fainter hosts could be either smaller or farther away stars that are, in both cases, more common, as previously discussed by Brown (2003).”
• A Transiting Planet of a Sun-like Star (2006, background): “A light curve consistent with a transiting planet more often is due to a grazing eclipsing binary star, a triple star system, or a stellar companion that is of planetary size but not of planetary mass (Brown 2003).”
• PRE-SPECTROSCOPIC FALSE-POSITIVE ELIMINATION OF KEPLER PLANET CANDIDATES (2010, background): “The large majority of false-positives are caused by either grazing or diluted eclipsing binaries ((Brown 2003)), the latter being the more likely.”
• DHP Framework: Digital Health Passports Using Blockchain - Use case on international tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic (2004, background): “Assuming ∼ 0.4 detections (three transits) per 104 stars (c.f. Brown 2003), we may expect transit lightcurves of perhaps ∼ 1000 exoplanetary systems over the mission lifetime, greatly aiding the determination of σ for these systems.”
• SOPHIE velocimetry of Kepler transit candidates VII. A false-positive rate of 35% for Kepler close-in giant candidates (2012, background): “Statistical analysis of stellar populations in the Milky Way can provide estimates of the false-positive rate (Brown 2003).”
• THE XO PLANETARY SURVEY PROJECT: ASTROPHYSICAL FALSE POSITIVES (2010, background): “More often than not, the subsequent RV measurements reveal not a planet but an astrophysical false positive (Brown 2003).”
• SPECKLE CAMERA OBSERVATIONS FOR THE NASA KEPLER MISSION FOLLOW-UP PROGRAM (2011, background): “The most likely source for such a false positive is a background eclipsing binary star nearly spatially coincident with the target star (Brown 2003).”
• The WASP Project and the SuperWASP Cameras (2006, background): “Brown (2003) showed that the number of bona fide exoplanet transits (as opposed to stellar impostors) is consistent with expected numbers of binary and multiple stellar and exoplanet systems.”
• TrES-1: The Transiting Planet of a Bright K0 V Star (2004, background): “These characteristics are consistent with expectations for a Jupiter-sized planet crossing a cool dwarf star, but both experience (Latham 2003; Charbonneau et al. 2004) and theory (Brown 2003) show that they are more likely to result from an eclipsing stellar system.”
• Observations of Transiting Exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) (2014, background): “…initially appears to be a small planet transiting a single star may actually be caused by a background eclipsing binary, an eclipsing binary physically bound to the target star, a larger planet transiting a star in a binary star system, or a larger planet transiting a background star (Brown 2003).”