Discovery of a Young Low-Mass Brown Dwarf Transiting a Fast-Rotating F-Type Star by the Galactic Plane eXoplanet (GPX) Survey

We announce the discovery of GPX-1 b, a transiting brown dwarf with a mass of 19.7 ± 1.6 MJup and a radius of 1.47 ± 0.10 RJup, the first substellar object discovered by the Galactic Plane eXoplanet (GPX) survey. The brown dwarf transits a moderately bright (V = 12.3 mag) fast-rotating F-type star with a projected rotational velocity v sin i∗ = 40 ± 10 km s−1. We use the isochrone placement algorithm to characterize the host star, which has effective temperature 7000 ± 200 K, mass 1.68 ± 0.10 M☉, radius 1.56 ± 0.10 R☉, and approximate age 0.27-0.15+0.09 Gyr. GPX-1 b has an orbital period of -1.75 d and a transit depth of 0.90 ± 0.03 per cent. We describe the GPX transit detection observations, subsequent photometric and speckle-interferometric follow-up observations, and SOPHIE spectroscopic measurements, which allowed us to establish the presence of a substellar object around the host star. GPX-1 was observed at 30-min integrations by TESS in Sector 18, but the data are affected by blending with a 3.4 mag brighter star 42 arcsec away. GPX-1 b is one of about two dozen transiting brown dwarfs known to date, with a mass close to the theoretical brown dwarf/gas giant planet mass transition boundary. Since GPX-1 is a moderately bright and fast-rotating star, it can be followed-up by the means of the Doppler tomography. © 2021 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their time and attention. The constructive comments we received helped us to improve the quality of the paper. This research has made use of the Exoplanet Orbit Database, the Exoplanet Data Explorer at exoplanets.org, Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia at exoplanets.eu, and the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This research was made possible through the use of the AAVSO Photometric All-Sky Survey (APASS), funded by the Robert Martin Ayers Sciences Fund and NSF AST-1412587. This research made use of Aladin (Bonnarel et al. 2000). IRAF is distributed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. This research made use of ASTROPY,3 a community-developed core PYTHON package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration 2013; Price-Whelan et al. 2018). We acknowledge the use of TESScut.MAST data from full frame time series images (FFI) collected by the TESS mission, which are publicly available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA?s Science Mission directorate. Resources supporting this work were provided by the NASA High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center for the production of the SPOC data products. PB thanks Bruce Gary, the XO survey, and the KELT survey for furthering his education in exoplanet research. AYB would like to thank Catarina Fernandes and Julien de Wit for helpful discussions about the system. Organization of the EXPANSION project (ES), follow-up campaign of the photometry observations, speckle-interferometry observations with 6-m telescope BTA were supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant 19-72-10023. The work of VK was supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, topic no. FEUZ-0836-2020-0038. This work was partly supported by the Ministry of Science and High Education of the Russian Federation (project no. FZZE-2020-0024) and Irkutsk State University (project no. 111-14-306). This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (project nos. FEUZ-2020-0030 and 075-15-2020-780). TRAPPIST-North is a project funded by the University of Liege, in collaboration with Cadi Ayyad University of Marrakech (Morocco). EJ and MG are F.R.S.-FNRS Senior Research Associates. The research leading to these results has received funding from the ARC grant for Concerted Research Actions financed by the Federation Wallonia-Brussels and from the International Balzan Prize Foundation. TRAPPIST is funded by the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique, FNRS) under the grant FRFC 2.5.594.09.F. EP acknowledges the Europlanet 2024 RI project funded by the European Union?s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (grant agreement no. 871149). AB acknowledge the support from the Program of Development of Lomonosov Moscow State University (Leading Scientific School ’Physics of stars, relativistic objects and galaxies’). OB thanks TÜBİTAK National Observatory for a partial support in using the T100 telescope with the project number 19AT100-1346. ODSD is supported by Portuguese national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) in the form of a work contract (DL 57/2016/CP1364/CT0004), institutional funds UIDB/04434/2020 and UIDP/04434/2020, and scientific projects funds PTDC/FIS-AST/28953/2017 and POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028953

Massive Search for Spot- A nd Facula-Crossing Events in 1598 Exoplanetary Transit Light Curves

We developed a dedicated statistical test for a massive detection of spot- A nd facula-crossing anomalies in multiple exoplanetary transit light curves, based on the frequentist p-value thresholding. This test was used to augment our algorithmic pipeline for transit light curves analysis. It was applied to 1598 amateur and professional transit observations of 26 targets being monitored in the EXPANSION project. We detected 109 statistically significant candidate events revealing a roughly 2 : 1 asymmetry in favor of spots-crossings over faculae-crossings. Although some candidate anomalies likely appear non-physical and originate from systematic errors, such asymmetry between negative and positive events should indicate a physical difference between the frequency of star spots and faculae. Detected spot-crossing events also reveal positive correlation between their amplitude and width, possibly due to spot size correlation. However, the frequency of all detectable crossing events appears just about a few per cent, so they cannot explain excessive transit timing noise observed for several targets

PG 1605+072 in Wet XCov22: Support for the Multi Site Spectroscopic Telescope

The Multi-site spectroscopic telescope is a virtual instrument and the name of a collaboration that opens up a new observational window by combining continuous observations of spectroscopic variations and simultaneous photometric monitoring. This constitutes an enormous observational effort, but in return promises to finally provide access to a mode identification for and an asteroseismological analysis of the pulsating sdB star PG 1605+072. Multi-Site Spectroscopic Telescope observations for this object have been secured during a large coordinated campaign in May and June of the year 2002. The frequency resolution and coverage of the photometric time series has been noticeably enhanced by a significant contribution from the Whole Earth Telescope, which was used to observe PG 1605+072 as an alternate target during the WET XCov22 campaign, also conducted in May 2002. This paper briefly outlines the motivation for the MSST project and tries to give a first assessment of the overall quality of the data obtained, with a focus on the Whole Earth Telescope observations

The pulsation modes of the pre-white dwarf PG 1159-035

Context. PG 1159-035 , a pre-white dwarf with $T_{{\rm eff}}$$\simeq$ 140 000 K, is the prototype of both two classes: the PG 1159 spectroscopic class and the DOV pulsating class. Previous studies of PG 1159-035 photometric data obtained with the Whole Earth Telescope (WET) showed a rich frequency spectrum allowing the identification of 122 pulsation modes. Analyzing the periods of pulsation, it is possible to measure the stellar mass, the rotational period and the inclination of the rotation axis, to estimate an upper limit for the magnetic field, and even to obtain information about the inner stratification of the star. Aims.We have three principal aims: to increase the number of detected and identified pulsation modes in PG 1159-035 , study trapping of the star's pulsation modes, and to improve or constrain the determination of stellar parameters. Methods.We used all available WET photometric data from 1983, 1985, 1989, 1993 and 2002 to identify the pulsation periods. Results.We identified 76 additional pulsation modes, increasing to 198 the number of known pulsation modes in PG 1159-035 , the largest number of modes detected in any star besides the Sun. From the period spacing we estimated a mass $M/M_\odot$ = 0.59 $\pm$ 0.02 for PG 1159-035 , with the uncertainty dominated by the models, not the observation. Deviations in the regular period spacing suggest that some of the pulsation modes are trapped, even though the star is a pre-white dwarf and the gravitational settling is ongoing. The position of the transition zone that causes the mode trapping was calculated at $r_{\rm c}/R_\star$ = 0.83 $\pm$ 0.05. From the multiplet splitting, we calculated the rotational period $P_{\rm rot}$ = 1.3920 $\pm$ 0.0008 days and an upper limit for the magnetic field, B < 2000 G. The total power of the pulsation modes at the stellar surface changed less than 30% for $\ell$ = 1 modes and less than 50% for $\ell$ = 2 modes. We find no evidence of linear combinations between the 198 pulsation mode frequencies. PG 1159-035 models have not significative convection zones, supporting the hypothesis that nonlinearity arises in the convection zones in cooler pulsating white dwarf stars