Pre-discovery observations of CoRoT-1b and CoRoT-2b with the BEST survey

Abstract

The BEST wide-angle telescope installed at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence and operated in remote control from Berlin by the Institut fuer Planetenforschung, DLR, has observed the CoRoT target fields prior to the mission. The resulting archive of stellar photometric lightcurves is used to search for deep transit events announced during CoRoT's alarm-mode to aid in fast photometric confirmation of these events. The "initial run" field of CoRoT (IRa01) has been observed with BEST in November and December 2006 for 12 nights. The first "long run" field (LRc01) was observed from June to September 2005 for 35 nights. After standard CCD data reduction, aperture photometry has been performed using the ISIS image subtraction method. About 30,000 lightcurves were obtained in each field. Transits of the first detected planets by the CoRoT mission, CoRoT-1b and CoRoT-2b, were found in archived data of the BEST survey and their lightcurves are presented here. Such detections provide useful information at the early stage of the organization of follow-up observations of satellite alarm-mode planet candidates. In addition, no period change was found over ~4 years between the first BEST observation and last available transit observations.

AJ, accepted

References in corpus (5)

• Homogeneous studies of transiting extrasolar planets. I. Light curve analyses
• Transiting exoplanets from the CoRoT space mission I - CoRoT-Exo-1b: a low-density short-period planet around a G0V star
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• Identification of Variable Stars in COROT's First Main Observing Field (LRc1)
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• The Berlin Exoplanet Search Telescope II. Catalog of Variable Stars. I. Characterization of Three Southern Target Fields
• The Berlin Exoplanet Search Telescope II Catalog of Variable Stars. II. Characterization of the CoRoT SRc02 field
• Census of Variable Stars toward Serpens Main