Efficient analysis in planet transit surveys

Abstract

With the growing number of projects dedicated to the search for extrasolar planets via transits, there is a need to develop fast, automatic, robust methods with a statistical background in order to efficiently do the analysis. We propose a modified analysis of variance (AoV) test particularly suitable for the detection of planetary transits in stellar light curves. We show how savings of labor by a factor of over 10 could be achieved by the careful organization of computations. Basing on solid analytical statistical formulation, we discuss performance of our and other methods for different signal-to-noise and number of observations.Comment: 7 pages, to be published in MNRAS, downloadable software from http://www.camk.edu.pl/~alex/#softwar