Abstract Details

Name: Aritra Chakrabarty
Affiliation: IIA, Bengaluru
Conference ID: ASI2019_393
Title : Precise Transit Photometric Observation of the Extra-solar Planets Using Indian Astronomical Facilities
Authors and Co-Authors : Aritra Chakrabarty (IIA), Sujan Sengupta (IIA)
Abstract Type : Oral
Abstract Category : Stars, ISM and Galaxy
Abstract : Transit photometry is a key tool for the detection and characterization of the extra-solar planets (exoplanets). Precise determination of the transit properties of the exoplanets calls for high precision photometry. For this purpose, we have used the 2m Himalayan Chandra Telescope and the 1.3m Jagadish Chandra Bhattacharyya Telescope leveraging their large apertures to achieve high photometric SNR and observed some confirmed planet-hosting stars to record the transit events of a few hot Jupiters such as WASP-33b, WASP-50b, WASP-12b, HATS-18b and HAT-P-36b. After the necessary reduction, we performed differential photometry to get precise transit light curves for the host stars which will be shown in the presentation. Then we modelled the transit light curves with the transit template light curve given in Mandel & Agol 2002 using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to get the transit parameters with high precision. Further, to reduce the noise due to stellar activity, varying sky brightness and other systematics we first applied Wavelet Denoising to the light curves and then modelled the remaining fluctuations in the denoised light curves with Gaussian correlated noise and subtracted from the original light curves. A comparative study of our results with the already published results confirms the improvement in the determination of the transit parameters which will also be shown in the presentation. This motivates us to conduct the search for exoplanets around the stars with no planet reported till date and extend our search to the system of terrestrial planets around solar-type of stars or brown dwarfs. For this purpose, the forthcoming national large-aperture ground-based telescopes such as the 3.6m Devasthal Optical Telescope or the space-bound telescopes will be undeniably useful.