Thermal Emission from Transiting Very-Hot Jupiters: Prospects for Ground-based Detection at Optical Wavelengths

Very hot Jupiters (VHJs) are defined as Jupiter-mass extrasolar planets with orbital periods shorter than three days. For low albedos the effective temperatures of irradiated VHJs can reach 2500-3000 K. Thermal emission from VHJs is therefore potentially strong at optical wavelengths. We explore the prospects of detecting optical-wavelength thermal emission during secondary eclipse with existing ground-based telescopes. We show that OGLE-TR-56b and OGLE-TR-132b are the best suited candidates for detection, and that the prospects are highest around z'-band (~0.9 microns). We also speculate that any newly discovered VHJs with the right combination of orbital separation and host star parameters could be thermally detected in the optical. The lack of detections would still provide constraints on the planetary albedos and re-radiation factors.Comment: accepted for publication on ApJ

Millimag Precision Photometry of Southern Bright Stars with a 1-m Telescope and a Standard CCD

This paper summarizes a three night observing campaign aimed at achieving milli-magnitude precision photometry of bright stars (V < 9.0) with the 1-meter Swope telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. The test targets were the main sequence stars HD205739 and HD135446. The results show that, by placing a concentric diaphragm in front of the aperture of the telescope, it is possible to avoid saturation and to achieve a photometric precision of 0.0008-0.0010 mag per data point with a cadence of less than 4 minutes. It is also possible to reach an overall precision of less that 0.0015 mags for time series of 6 hours or more. The photometric precision of this setup is only limited by scintillation. Scintillation could be reduced, and therefore the photometric precision could be further improved, by using a neutral density filter instead of the aperture stop. Given that the expected median depth of extrasolar planet transits of about 0.01 mags, and their typical duration of several hours, the results of this paper show that 1-m telescopes equipped with standard CCDs can be used to detect planet transits as shallow as 0.002 mags around bright stars.Comment: 15 pages. Presented at the 207th AAS meeting, 8-12 January 2006 - Washington, D

Optimizing Ground-based Observations of O2 in Earth Analogs

We present the result of calculations to optimize the search for molecular oxygen (O2) in Earth analogs transiting around nearby, low-mass stars using ground-based, high-resolution, Doppler shift techniques. We investigate a series of parameters, namely spectral resolution, wavelength coverage of the observations, and sky coordinates and systemic velocity of the exoplanetary systems, to find the values that optimize detectability of O2. We find that increasing the spectral resolution of observations to R = 300,000 - 400,000 from the typical R ~ 100,000, more than doubles the average depth of O2 lines in planets with atmospheres similar to Earth's. Resolutions higher than about 500,000 do not produce significant gains in the depths of the O2 lines. We confirm that observations in the O2 A-band are the most efficient except for M9V host stars, for which observations in the O2 NIR-band are more efficient. Combining observations in the O2 A, B, and NIR -bands can reduce the number of transits needed to produce a detection of O2 by about 1/3 in the case of white noise limited observations. However, that advantage disappears in the presence of typical levels of red noise. Therefore, combining observations in more than one band produces no significant gains versus observing only in the A-band, unless red-noise can be significantly reduced. Blending between the exoplanet's O2 lines and telluric O2 lines is a known problem. We find that problem can be alleviated by increasing the resolution of the observations, and by giving preference to targets near the ecliptic.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journa