1,027 research outputs found
High-resolution imaging of planet host candidates. A comprehensive comparison of different techniques
The Kepler mission has discovered thousands of planet candidates. Currently,
some of them have already been discarded; more than 200 have been confirmed by
follow-up observations, and several hundreds have been validated. However, most
of them are still awaiting for confirmation. Thus, priorities (in terms of the
probability of the candidate being a real planet) must be established for
subsequent observations. The motivation of this work is to provide a set of
isolated (good) host candidates to be further tested by other techniques. We
identify close companions of the candidates that could have contaminated the
light curve of the planet host. We used the AstraLux North instrument located
at the 2.2 m telescope in the Calar Alto Observatory to obtain
diffraction-limited images of 174 Kepler objects of interest. The lucky-imaging
technique used in this work is compared to other AO and speckle imaging
observations of Kepler planet host candidates. We define a new parameter, the
blended source confidence level (BSC), to assess the probability of an object
to have blended non-detected eclipsing binaries capable of producing the
detected transit. We find that 67.2% of the observed Kepler hosts are isolated
within our detectability limits, and 32.8% have at least one visual companion
at angular separations below 6 arcsec. We find close companions (below 3
arcsec) for the 17.2% of the sample. The planet properties of this sample of
non-isolated hosts are revised. We report one possible S-type binary
(KOI-3158). We also report three possible false positives (KOIs 1230.01,
3649.01, and 3886.01) due to the presence of close companions. The BSC
parameter is calculated for all the isolated targets and compared to both the
value prior to any high-resolution image and, when possible, to observations
from previous high-spatial resolution surveys in the Kepler sample.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A on April 29, 2014; 32 pages, 11
figures, 11 table
VOSA: Virtual Observatory SED Analyzer. An application to the Collinder 69 open cluster
The physical properties of almost any kind of astronomical object can be
derived by fitting synthetic spectra or photometry extracted from theoretical
models to observational data.
We want to develop an automatic procedure to perform this kind of fittings to
a relatively large sample of members of a stellar association and apply this
methodology to the case of Collinder 69.
We combine the multiwavelength data of our sources and follow a work-flow to
derive the physical parameters of the sources. The key step of the work-flow is
performed by a new VO-tool, VOSA. All the steps in this process are done in a
VO environment.
We present this new tool, and provide physical parameters such as T, gravity, luminosity, etc. for 170 candidate members to Collinder
69, and an upper-limit for the age of this stellar association.
This kind of studies of star forming regions, clusters, etc. produces a huge
amount of data, very tedious to analyse using the traditional methodology.
Thus, they are excellent examples where to apply the VO capabilities.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&
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