Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• García-Melendo, E.
• López-Morales, M.

Titel

Potential biases in the detection of planetary systems with large transit timing variations

Ist Teil von

• Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Letters, 2011-10, Vol.417 (1), p.L16-L20

Ort / Verlag

Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• ABSTRACT The transit timing variations (TTVs) technique provides a powerful tool to detect additional planets in transiting exoplanetary systems. In this Letter, we show how transiting planets with significant TTVs can be systematically missed, or catalogued as false positives, by current transit search algorithms, unless they are in multitransit systems. If the period of the TTVs, PTTV, is longer than the time baseline of the observations and its amplitude, ATTV, is larger than the timing precision limit of the data, transiting planet candidates are still detected, but with incorrect ephemerides. Therefore, they will be discarded during follow‐up. When PTTV is shorter than the time baseline of the observations and ATTV is sufficiently large, constant period search algorithms find an average period for the system, which results in altered transit durations and depths in the folded light curves. Those candidates can get subsequently discarded as eclipsing binaries, grazing eclipses or blends. Also, for large enough ATTV values, the transits can get fully occulted by the photometric dispersion of the light curves. These detection biases could explain the observed statistical differences between the frequency of multiple systems among planets detected via other techniques and those detected via transits. We suggest that new transit search algorithms allowing for non‐constant period planets should be implemented.