Gifts from Exoplanetary Transits

The discovery of transiting extrasolar planets has enabled us a number of interesting stduies. Transit photometry reveals the radius and the orbital inclination of transiting planets, and thereby we can learn the true mass and the density of respective planets by the combined information of radial velocity measurements. In addition, follow-up observations of transiting planets such as secondary eclipse, transit timing variations, transmission spectroscopy, and the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect provide us information of their dayside temperature, unseen bodies in systems, planetary atmospheres, and obliquity of planetary orbits. Such observational information, which will provide us a greater understanding of extrasolar planets, is available only for transiting planets. Here I briefly summarize what we can learn from transiting planets and introduce previous studies.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the 2nd Subaru International Conference "Exoplanets and Disks: Their Formation and Diversity" Keauhou - Hawaii - USA, 9-12 March 200

First Evidence of a Retrograde Orbit of Transiting Exoplanet HAT-P-7b

We present the first evidence of a retrograde orbit of the transiting exoplanet HAT-P-7b. The discovery is based on a measurement of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect with the Subaru HDS during a transit of HAT-P-7b, which occurred on UT 2008 May 30. Our best-fit model shows that the spin-orbit alignment angle of this planet is \lambda = -132.6 (+10.5, -16.3) degrees. The existence of such a retrograde planet have been predicted by recent planetary migration models considering planet-planet scattering processes or the Kozai migration. Our finding provides an important milestone that supports such dynamic migration theories.Comment: PASJ Letters, in press [13 pages

Luminosity functions of YSO clusters in Sh-2 255, W3 main and NGC 7538 star forming regions

We have conducted deep near-infrared surveys of the Sh-2 255, W3 Main and NGC 7538 massive star forming regions using simultaneous observations of the J H Ks-band with the near-infrared camera SIRIUS on the UH 88-inch telescope. The near-infrared surveys cover a total area of ∼ 72 square arcmin of three regions with 10-σ limiting magnitudes of ∼ 19.5, 18.4 and 17.3 in J, H and Ks-band, respectively. Based on the colour-colour and colourmagnitude diagrams and their clustering properties, the candidate young stellar objects are identified and their luminosity functions are constructed in Sh-2 255, W3 Main and NGC 7538. A large number of previously unreported red sources (H − K > 2) have also been detected around these regions. We argue that these red stars are most probably pre-main sequence stars with intrinsic colour excesses. The detected young stellar objects show a clear clustering pattern in each region: the Class I-like sources are mostly clustered in molecular cloud region, while the Class II-like sources in or around more evolved optical H II regions. We find that the slopes of the Ks-band luminosity functions of Sh-2 255, W3 Main and NGC 7538 are lower than the typical values reported for the young embedded clusters and their stellar populations are primarily composed of low mass pre-main sequence stars. From the slopes of the Ks-band luminosity functions, we infer that Sh-2 255, W3 Main and NGC 7538 star forming regions are rather young (age ≤ 1 Myr)

Initial Conditions of Planet Formation: Lifetimes of Primordial Disks

The statistical properties of circumstellar disks around young stars are important for constraining theoretical models for the formation and early evolution of planetary systems. In this brief review, I survey the literature related to ground-based and Spitzer-based infrared (IR) studies of young stellar clusters, with particular emphasis on tracing the evolution of primordial (``protoplanetary'') disks through spectroscopic and photometric diagnostics. The available data demonstrate that the fraction of young stars with optically thick primordial disks and/or those which show spectroscopic evidence for accretion appears to approximately follow an exponential decay with characteristic time ~2.5 Myr (half-life = 1.7 Myr). Large IR surveys of ~2-5 Myr-old stellar samples show that there is real cluster-by-cluster scatter in the observed disk fractions as a function of age. Recent Spitzer surveys have found convincing evidence that disk evolution varies by stellar mass and environment (binarity, proximity to massive stars, and cluster density). Perhaps most significantly for understanding the planeticity of stars, the disk fraction decay timescale appears to vary by stellar mass, ranging from ~1 Myr for >1.3 Msun stars to ~3 Myr for <0.08 Msun brown dwarfs. The exponential decay function may provide a useful empirical formalism for estimating very rough ages for YSO populations and for modeling the effects of disk-locking on the angular momentum of young stars.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, invited review, Proceedings of the 2nd Subaru International Conference "Exoplanets and Disks: Their Formation and Diversity", Keauhou - Hawaii - USA, 9-12 March 200