A promising method to detect earth-sized exoplanets is the timing analysis of a known transit. The technique allows a search for variations in transit duration or center induced by the perturbation of a third body, e.g. a second planet or an exomoon. To this aim, TASTE (The Asiago Survey for Timing transit variations of Exoplanets) project will collect high-precision, short-cadence light curves for a selected sample of transits by using imaging differential photometry at the Asiago 1.82m telescope. The first light curves show that our project can already provide a competitive timing accuracy, as well as a significant improvement over the orbital parameters. We derived refined ephemerides for HAT-P-3b and HAT-P-14b with only one transit each, thanks to a timing accuracy of 11 and 25 s, respectively.
@article{arxiv.1009.5905,
title = {TASTE: The Asiago Survey for Timing transit variations of Exoplanets},
author = {V. Nascimbeni and G. Piotto and L. R. Bedin and M. Damasso},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1009.5905},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures. To appear in Mem. SAIt "L'astronomia italiana: prospettive per la prossima decade"