Seminars at FGG
"TASTE@TNG: Searching for low-mass planets with Transit Time Variations"
Speaker: Valerio Nascimbeni (Universitá di Padova, INAF-OAPD)
Date and time: 2012-03-22 11:30
"The Transit Time Variation (TTV) is a powerful technique to discover low-mass exoplanets. A single planet in a Keplerian orbit is expected to transit with a strictly constant period, unless it is perturbed by a third body. By performing accurate measurements of the mid-transit time T0 of a known planet, it is possible to detect deviations from a constant period, and to infer the parameters of the perturber. The TASTE project was started in 2010 to probe low-mass planets with the TTV technique (Nascimbeni et al. 2011), by gathering light curves of known transiting planets from several 0.8-3.6m telescopes in Italy, Canary Islands, and Chile. The "hot neptune" HAT-P-26b is a rare "inflated" neptune-mass planet, and its planetary system is suspected to be multiple. We are presently monitoring four transits of HAT-P-26b by performing high-precision differential photometry with DOLORES. We will show some preliminary, very promising results from the first observing run."