LUNA: An algorithm for generating dynamic planet-moon transits

It has been previously shown that moons of extrasolar planets may be detectable with the Kepler Mission, for moon masses above ~0.2 Earth masses Kipping et al. 2009c. Transit timing effects have been formerly identified as a potent tool to this end, exploiting the dynamics of the system. In this work, we explore the simulation of transit light curves of a planet plus a single moon including not only the transit timing effects but also the light curve signal of the moon itself. We introduce our new algorithm, LUNA, which produces transit light curves for both bodies, analytically accounting for shadow overlaps, stellar limb darkening and planet-moon dynamical motion. By building the dynamics into the core of LUNA, the routine automatically accounts for transit timing/duration variations and ingress/egress asymmetries for not only the planet, but also the moon. We then generate some artificial data for two feasibly detectable hypothetical systems of interest: a i) prograde and ii) retrograde Earth-like moon around a habitable-zone Neptune for a M-dwarf system. We fit the hypothetical systems using LUNA and demonstrate the feasibility of detecting these cases with Kepler photometry.Comment: Accepted in MNRAS, 2011 May 16. Minor typos corrected (thanks to S. Awiphan

Binning is sinning: morphological light-curve distortions due to finite integration time

We explore how finite integration times or equivalently temporal binning induces morphological distortions to the transit light-curve. These distortions, if uncorrected for, lead to the retrieval of erroneous system parameters and may even lead to some planetary candidates being rejected as ostensibly unphysical. We provide analytic expressions for estimating the disturbance to the various light-curve parameters as a function of the integration time. These effects are particularly crucial in light of the long-cadence photometry often used for discovering new exoplanets by, for example, Convection Rotation and Planetary Transits (COROT) and the Kepler Mission (8.5 and 30 min). One of the dominant effects of long integration times is a systematic underestimation of the light-curve-derived stellar density, which has significant ramifications for transit surveys. We present a discussion of numerical integration techniques to compensate for the effects and produce expressions to quickly estimate the errors of such techniques, as a function of integration time and numerical resolution. This allows for an economic choice of resolution before attempting fits of long-cadence light-curves. We provide a comparison of the short- and long-cadence light-curves of TrES-2b and show that the retrieved transit parameters are consistent using the techniques discussed here.Comment: Long delayed upload of the MNRAS accepted version, 10 pages, 3 figure