TrES Exoplanets and False Positives: Finding the Needle in the Haystack

O'Donovan, Francis T.; Charbonneau, David

TrES Exoplanets and False Positives: Finding the Needle in the Haystack

Authors

Description

Our incomplete understanding of the formation of gas giants and of their mass-radius relationship has motivated ground-based, wide-field surveys for new transiting extrasolar giant planets. Yet, astrophysical false positives have dominated the yield from these campaigns. Astronomical systems where the light from a faint eclipsing binary and a bright star is blended, producing a transit-like light curve, are particularly difficult to eliminate. As part of the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey, we have encountered numerous false positives and have developed a procedure to reject them. We present examples of these false positives, including the blended system GSC 03885-00829 which we showed to be a K dwarf binary system superimposed on a late F dwarf star. This transit candidate in particular demonstrates the careful analysis required to identify astrophysical false positives in a transit survey. From amongst these impostors, we have found two transiting planets. We discuss our follow-up observations of TrES-2, the first transiting planet in the Kepler field.
v1. 6 pages, 5 figures. To appear in the ASP Conference Series: "Transiting Extrasolar Planets Workshop", MPIA Heidelberg Germany, 25-28 September 2006. Eds: Cristina Afonso, David Weldrake & Thomas Henning