Transits and Occultations

By J. Winn. 2010

164 citations recorded by the source corpus.

When we are fortunate enough to view an exoplanetary system nearly edge-on, the star and planet periodically eclipse each other. Observations of eclipses (transits and occultations) provide a bonanza of information that cannot be obtained from radial-velocity data alone, such as the relative dimensions of the planet and its host star, as well as the orientation of the planet's orbit relative to the sky plane and relative to the stellar rotation axis. The wavelength-dependence of the eclipse signal gives clues about the the temperature and composition of the planetary atmosphere. Anomalies in the timing or other properties of the eclipses may betray the presence of additional planets or moons. Searching for eclipses is also a productive means of discovering new planets. This chapter reviews the basic geometry and physics of eclipses, and summarizes the knowledge that has been gained through eclipse observations, as well as the information that might be gained in the future.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/847238f664bcbc73a7947325075128d5177a0eda

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Citations in the corpus

• FUNDAMENTAL PROPERTIES OF KEPLER PLANET-CANDIDATE HOST STARS USING ASTEROSEISMOLOGY (2013, unknown): “For the special case of circular orbits, a/R∗ is directly related to the mean density of the star (see, e.g., Seager & Mallén-Ornelas 2003; Winn 2010): 〈ρ 〉 ≈ 3π GP 2 ( a R )3 , (5) where G is the gravitational constant and P is the orbital period.”
• THE OCCURRENCE OF POTENTIALLY HABITABLE PLANETS ORBITING M DWARFS ESTIMATED FROM THE FULL KEPLER DATASET AND AN EMPIRICAL MEASUREMENT OF THE DETECTION SENSITIVITY (2015, methodology): “First, we predicted the expected transit duration as a function of orbital period based on the mass and radius of the target star (Winn 2010).”
• The TRAPPIST survey of southern transiting planets. I. Thirty eclipses of the ultra-short period planet WASP-43 b (2012, methodology): “At each step of the Markov Chains, the stellar density is derived from Kepler’s third law and the jump parametersdF, b′, W, √ e cosω and √ e sinω (Seager & Mallen-Ornelas 2003, Winn 2010).”
• REVISED STELLAR PROPERTIES OF KEPLER TARGETS FOR THE QUARTER 1–16 TRANSIT DETECTION RUN (2013, background): “• Transits: Transiting exoplanets allow accurate measurements of the mean stellar density if the orbital eccentricity and impact parameter are accurately known (see, e.g., Seager & Mallén-Ornelas 2003; Brown 2010; Winn 2010).”
• THE CLIMATE OF HD 189733b FROM FOURTEEN TRANSITS AND ECLIPSES MEASURED BY SPITZER (2010, methodology): “…are computed for each transit or eclipse by computing the system parameters from the model parameters from each simulation (using the relations in Winn 2010), computing the standard deviation of the results from the simulations as an estimate of the errors on each parameter, and then taking a…”