The XO Project: Searching for Transiting Extrasolar Planet Candidates

By P. McCullough, J. Stys, J. Valenti, S. Fleming, K. Janes, Jim Heasley. 2005

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The XO project’s first objective is to find hot Jupiters transiting bright stars (i.e., V<12) by precision differential photometry. Two XO cameras have been operating since 2003 September on the 10,000 foot Haleakala summit on Maui. Each XO camera consists of a 200 mm f/1.8 lens coupled to a 1024 × 1024 pixel, thinned CCD operated by drift‐scanning. In its first year of routine operation, XO has observed 6.6% of the sky within six 7° wide strips scanned from 0° to +63° of declination and centered at R.A. = 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, and 20 hr. Autonomously operating, XO records 1 billion pixels per clear night, calibrates them photometrically and astrometrically, performs aperture photometry, archives the pixel data, and transmits the photometric data to the Space Telescope Science Institute for further analysis. From the first year of operation, the resulting database consists of photometry of ∼100,000 stars at more than 1000 epochs per star, with differential photometric precision better than 1% per epoch. Analysis of the light curves of those stars produces transiting‐planet candidates requiring detailed follow‐up, described elsewhere, culminating in spectroscopy to measure radial velocity variation in order to differentiate genuine planets from the more numerous impostors, primarily eclipsing binary and multiple stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

The NASA Exoplanet Archive: Data and Tools for Exoplanet Research (2013, background): “…have been provided by the shallow wide-field surveys such as the Transatlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES) (Alonso et al. 2004), the XO project (McCullough et al. 2005), the Hungarian Automated Telescope Network (HATNet) (Bakos et al. 2004), SuperWASP (Pollacco et al. 2006), and Kilodegree…”
THE TRANSITING EXOPLANET SURVEY SATELLITE: SIMULATIONS OF PLANET DETECTIONS AND ASTROPHYSICAL FALSE POSITIVES (2015, background): “Previous wide-field transit surveys, such as HAT (Bakos et al. 2004), TrES (Alonso et al. 2004), XO (McCullough et al. 2005), WASP (Pollacco et al. 2006), and KELT (Pepper et al. 2007), have been conducted with ground-based telescopes.”
TRANSIT DETECTION IN THE MEarth SURVEY OF NEARBY M DWARFS: BRIDGING THE CLEAN-FIRST, SEARCH-LATER DIVIDE (2012, methodology): “Using these methods, surveys such as TrES (Alonso et al. 2004), HATNet (Bakos et al. 2004), XO (McCullough et al. 2005), WASP (Pollacco et al. 2006) and KELT (Siverd et al. 2012; Beatty et al. 2012) have made the ground-based detection of hot gas giants transiting Sun-like stars routine.”
HATSouth: A Global Network of Fully Automated Identical Wide-Field Telescopes (2012, background): “…transit surveys employing automated telescopes (and networks in several cases) such as WASP (Pollacco et al. 2006), HATNet (Bakos et al. 2004), CoRoT (Baglin et al. 2006), OGLE (Udalski et al. 2002), Kepler (Borucki et al. 2010), XO (McCullough et al. 2005), and TrES (Alonso et al. 2004).”
HAT-P-16b: A 4 MJ PLANET TRANSITING A BRIGHT STAR ON AN ECCENTRIC ORBIT, (2010, background): “…are primarily the result of dedicated ground– based searches, such as SuperWASP (Pollacco et al. 2006), HATNet (Bakos et al. 2004), TrES (Alonso et al. 2004) and XO (McCullough et al. 2005), and spaceborne searches, such as CoRoT (Baglin et al. 2006) and Kepler (Borucki et al. 2010).”
Observational Evidence for Tidal Interaction in Close Binary Systems (2007, background): “Furthermore, a new wave of observational effort to search for transiting planets by small, 10-cm class, telescopes is now at its full thrust (e.g., HATnet — Bakos et al. 2004; XO — McCullough et al. 2005; WASP — Pollacco et al. 2006; TrES — Alonso et al. 2007).”
Transits and Occultations (2010, background): “Many of today’s transiting planets are named after these surveys: for more details see Udalski et al. (2002), Alonso et al. (2004), McCullough et al. (2005), Bakos et al. (2007), and Pollacco et al. (2006).”
A Transiting Planet of a Sun-like Star (2006, background): “McCullough et al. (2005) describe the instrumentation, operation, analysis, and pre- liminary results of the XO project.3 In summary, the XO observatory monitored tens of thousands of bright (V< 12) stars twice every ten minutes on clear nights for more than 2 months per season of visibility for…”
THE XO PLANETARY SURVEY PROJECT: ASTROPHYSICAL FALSE POSITIVES (2010, methodology): “In this paper we report on some of the astrophysical false positives observed by the XO project (McCullough et al. 2005).”
Design Considerations for a Ground-Based Transit Search for Habitable Planets Orbiting M Dwarfs (2007, background): “Wide-angle ground surveys, such as HATNet (Bakos et al. 2004), SuperWASP (Pollacco et al. 2006), TrES (Alonso et al. 2004), and XO (McCullough et al. 2005) cumulatively cover swaths of sky containing large numbers of nearby M dwarfs, but at the expense of employing apertures too modest to…”