Characterizing Transiting Extrasolar Planets with Narrow-Band Photometry and GTC/OSIRIS

Abstract

We report the first extrasolar planet observations from the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), currently the world's largest, fully steerable, single-aperture optical telescope. We used the OSIRIS tunable filter imager on the GTC to acquire high-precision, narrow-band photometry of the transits of the giant exoplanets, TrES-2b and TrES-3b. We obtained near-simultaneous observations in two near-infrared (NIR) wavebands (790.2 and 794.4 +/- 2.0 nm) specifically chosen to avoid water vapor absorption and skyglow so as to minimize the atmospheric effects that often limit the precision of ground-based photometry. Our results demonstrate a very-high photometric precision with minimal atmospheric contamination despite relatively poor atmospheric conditions and some technical problems with the telescope. We find the photometric precision for the TrES-2 observations to be 0.343 and 0.412 mmag for the 790.2 and 794.4 nm light curves, and the precision of the TrES-3 observations was found to be 0.470 and 0.424 mmag for the 790.2 and 794.4 nm light curves. We also discuss how future follow-up observations of transiting planets with this novel technique can contribute to the characterization of Neptune- and super-Earth-size planets to be discovered by space-based missions like CoRoT and Kepler, as well as measure atmospheric properties of giant planets, such as the strength of atmospheric absorption features.

9 pages, including 3 figures and 2 tables; accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (29)

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• ExoClock Project III: 450 new exoplanet ephemerides from ground and space observations
• Visible-light Phase Curves from the Second Year of the TESS Primary Mission
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• A Search for Methane in the Atmosphere of GJ 1214b via GTC Narrow-Band Transmission Spectrophotometry
• Probing potassium in the atmosphere of HD 80606b with tunable filter transit spectrophotometry from the Gran Telescopio Canarias
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• Follow-up photometry of TrES-3
• The GTC exoplanet transit spectroscopy survey II: An overly-large Rayleigh-like feature for exoplanet TrES-3b
• Constraining the False Positive Rate for Kepler Planet Candidates with Multi-Color Photometry from the GTC
• An extremely high photometric precision in ground-based observations of two transits in the WASP-50 planetary system
• On the Inclination Dependence of Exoplanet Phase Signatures
• Narrow Band Halpha Photometry of the Super-Earth GJ 1214b with GTC/OSIRIS Tunable Filters
• Detecting the Signatures of Uranus and Neptune
• Probing Transit Timing Variation and its Possible Origin with Twelve New Transits of TrES-3b
• Distinguishing Between Stellar and Planetary Companions With Phase Monitoring
• Planetary Phase Variations of the 55 Cancri System
• Transmission spectroscopy of the hot Jupiter TrES-3 b: Disproof of an overly large Rayleigh-like feature
• Photometric Investigation of Hot Exoplanets: TrES-3b and Qatar-1b
• Photometric Follow-up Transit (Primary Eclipse) Observations of WASP-43 b and TrES-3b and A Study on Their Transit Timing Variations
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• Vetting Kepler Planet Candidates with Multi-Color Photometry from the GTC: Identification of an Eclipsing Binary Star Near KOI 565
• Planet-star interactions with precise transit timing. IV. Probing the regime of dynamical tides for GK host stars
• The Oxyometer: A Novel Instrument Concept for Characterizing Exoplanet Atmospheres