Related papers: Blend Analysis of HATNet Transit Candidates
We investigate the rate of false planetary transit detection due to blending with eclipsing binaries. Our approach is purely empirical and is based on the analysis of the artificially blended light curves of the eclipsing binary stars in…
Wide-field photometric transit surveys for Jupiter-sized planets are inundated by astrophysical false positives, namely systems that contain an eclipsing binary and mimic the desired photometric signature. We discuss several examples of…
Differentiating between real transit events and false positive signals in photometric time series data is a bottleneck in the identification of transiting exoplanets, particularly long-period planets. This differentiation typically requires…
Astrophysical false positives due to stellar eclipsing binaries pose one of the greatest challenges to ground-based surveys for transiting Hot Jupiters. We have used known properties of multiple star systems and Hot Jupiter systems to…
One of the biggest challenges facing large transit surveys is the elimination of false-positives from the vast number of transit candidates. We investigate to what extent information from the lightcurves can identify blend scenarios and…
Ground-based wide-field surveys for nearby transiting gas giants are yielding far fewer true planets than astrophysical false positives, of which some are difficult to reject. Recent experience has highlighted the need for careful analysis…
The radial velocity technique is currently used to classify transiting objects. While capable of identifying grazing binary eclipses, this technique cannot reliably identify blends, a chance overlap of a faint background eclipsing binary…
Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while…
We report high-resolution spectroscopic follow-up observations of the faint transiting planet candidate OGLE-TR-33 (V = 14.7), located in the direction of the Galactic center. Small changes in the radial velocity of the star were detected…
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…
Wide-field searches for transiting extra-solar giant planets face the difficult challenge of separating true transit events from the numerous false positives caused by isolated or blended eclipsing binary systems. We describe here the…
The forthcoming space missions, able to detect Earth-like planets by the transit method, will a fortiori also be able to detect the transit of artificial planet-size objects. Multiple artificial objects would produce lightcurves easily…
Searches for planetary transits find many astrophysical false positives as a by-product. There are four main types analyzed in the literature: a grazing-incidence eclipsing binary star, an eclipsing binary star with a small radius companion…
We present a technique for verifying or refuting exoplanet candidates from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission by searching for nearby eclipsing binary stars using higher-resolution archival images from ground-based…
Transit searches provide a large number of planet candidates. Before attempting follow-up observations, the best effort should be spent in classifying the light-curves, rejecting false alarms and selecting the most likely ones for real…
We analyze the properties of searches devoted to finding planetary transits by observing simple stellar systems, such as globular clusters, open clusters, and the Galactic bulge. We develop the analytic tools necessary to predict the number…
We present an algorithm that can detect blends of bright stars with fainter, un-associated eclipsing binaries. Such systems contaminate searches for transiting planets, in particular in crowded fields where blends are common. Spectroscopic…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
Transit timing variations - deviations from strict periodicity between successive passages of a transiting planet - can be used to probe the structure and dynamics of multiple-planet systems. In this paper, we examine prospects for…
Transit search programs such as CoRoT and Kepler now have the capability of detecting planets as small as the Earth. The detection of these planets however requires the removal of all false positives. Although many false positives can be…