The Transit Light Curve Project. IX. Evidence for a Smaller Radius of the Exoplanet XO-3b

By J. Winn, M. Holman, G. Torres, P. McCullough, C. Johns–Krull, D. Latham, Avi Shporer, T. Mazeh, E. García‐Melendo, C. Foote and 2 more. 2008

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We present photometry of 13 transits of XO-3b, a massive transiting planet on an eccentric orbit. Previous data led to two inconsistent estimates of the planetary radius. Our data strongly favor the smaller radius, with increased precision: Rp = 1.217 ± 0.073 RJup. A conflict remains between the mean stellar density determined from the light curve, and the stellar surface gravity determined from the shapes of spectral lines. We argue the light curve should take precedence, and revise the system parameters accordingly. The planetary radius is about 1 σ larger than the theoretical radius for a hydrogen-helium planet of the given mass and insolation. To help in planning future observations, we provide refined transit and occultation ephemerides.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d7da650abfa8807a2e2439109d81076404565c85

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Citations in the corpus

An HST optical-to-near-IR transmission spectrum of the hot Jupiter WASP-19b: detection of atmospheric water and likely absence of TiO (2013, methodology): “The best aperture size and background subtraction were selected from measuring white noise and the correlated noise in the OOT exposures using the binning technique described in Pont, Zucker & Queloz (2006) and Winn et al. (2008).”
Misaligned spin-orbit in the XO-3 planetary system?† (2008, methodology): “Up to now, spectroscopic transits have been detected for eight exoplanets: HD 209458b (Queloz et al. 2000, Winn et al. 2005), HD 189733b (Winn et al. 2006), HD 149026b (Wolf et al. 2007), TrES-1 (Narita et al. 2007), HD 147506b (Winn et al. 2007; Loeillet et al. 2008), HD 17156b Article published by”
A Gaussian process framework for modelling instrumental systematics: application to transmission spectroscopy (2011, methodology): “In practice this can be done using Monte-Carlo MarkovChains (MCMC) methods, which are widely used in the exoplanet community to explore the joint posterior probability distribution of multivariate models (see e.g. Collier Cameron et al. 2007; Holman et al. 2006; Winn et al. 2008).”
Homogeneous studies of transiting extrasolar planets - III. Additional planets and stellar models (2010, methodology): “Follow-up transit photometry has been presented by Sozzetti et al. (2009) and Gibson et al. (2009), and occultation (secondary eclipse) observations have been secured by Winn et al. (2008a).”
ORBITAL PHASE VARIATIONS OF THE ECCENTRIC GIANT PLANET HAT-P-2b (2013, methodology): “As a result, we instead opt to use the ‘residual-permutation’ or ‘prayerbead’ method to estimate the errors in our parameters in the presence of correlated noise (see, for example Jenkins et al. 2002; Southworth 2008; Bean et al. 2008; Winn et al. 2008).”
TRANSMISSION SPECTROSCOPY OF THE HOT JUPITER WASP-12b FROM 0.7 TO 5 μm (2013, background): “In agreement with Swain et al. (2013), correlation plots of RMSvs. bin size indicate that there is no significant time-correlated noise in the data and, as such, there is no need to inflate uncertainty estimates (Winn et al. 2008).”
Kepler-22b: A 2.4 EARTH-RADIUS PLANET IN THE HABITABLE ZONE OF A SUN-LIKE STAR (2011, methodology): “We incorporate the effect of remaining correlated noise with a residual permutation analysis of the errors as described by Winn et al. (2008), wherein we find the best-fit model f ′ to the light curve as given by Equation (1), subtract this model from the light curve, shift the residuals by one…”
Accurate Empirical Radii and Masses of Planets and Their Host Stars with Gaia Parallaxes (2016, background): “…0.073p RJ and distance d=174±18 pc based on the stellar density from the transit light curves.12 We find a significantly lower empirical value of planet mass = M 7.290 1.188p MJ and a slightly higher planet radius = R 1.414 0.121p RJ and distance d=201.7±14.2 pc compared to Winn et al. (2008).”
IMPROVED SPECTROSCOPIC PARAMETERS FOR TRANSITING PLANET HOSTS (2012, background): “In particular, it has been recognized for some time (e.g., Sozzetti et al. 2007; Holman et al. 2007; Winn et al. 2008) that surface gravities are often poorly constrained by spectral analyses.”
LACK OF INFLATED RADII FOR KEPLER GIANT PLANET CANDIDATES RECEIVING MODEST STELLAR IRRADIATION (2011, methodology): “For each chunk of data, correlated noise was accounted for following Winn et al. (2008); Gillon et al. (2010), to ensure reliable error bars on the fitted parameters.”
FRIENDS OF HOT JUPITERS. I. A RADIAL VELOCITY SEARCH FOR MASSIVE, LONG-PERIOD COMPANIONS TO CLOSE-IN GAS GIANT PLANETS (2013, unknown): “…al. (2010); (18) Howard et al. (2012); (19) Fulton et al. (2013); (20) Hartman et al. (2011a); (21) Bakos et al. (2011); (22) Kipping et al. (2010); (23) Hartman et al. (2011b); (24) Buchhave et al. (2011); (25) Johnson et al. (2011); (26) Kipping et al. (2011)); (27) Hartman et al. (2011c); (28)…”