Transiting Planets with LSST II. Period Detection of Planets Orbiting 1 Solar Mass Hosts

Abstract

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will photometrically monitor approximately 1 billion stars for ten years. The resulting light curves can be used to detect transiting exoplanets. In particular, as demonstrated by Lund et al. (2015), LSST will probe stellar populations currently undersampled in most exoplanet transit surveys, including out to extragalactic distances. In this paper we test the efficiency of the box-fitting least-squares (BLS) algorithm for accurately recovering the periods of transiting exoplanets using simulated LSST data. We model planets with a range of radii orbiting a solar-mass star at a distance of 7 kpc, with orbital periods ranging from 0.5 to 20 days. We find that standard-cadence LSST observations will be able to reliably recover the periods of Hot Jupiters with periods shorter than approximately 3 days, however it will remain a challenge to confidently distinguish these transiting planets from false positives. At the same time, we find that the LSST deep drilling cadence is extremely powerful: the BLS algorithm successfully recovers at least 30% of sub-Saturn-size exoplanets with orbital periods as long as 20 days, and a simple BLS power criterion robustly distinguishes approximately 98% of these from photometric (i.e. statistical) false positives.

12 pages, 13 figures; accepted to Astronomical Journal 150 34

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• On the detectability of transiting planets orbiting white dwarfs using LSST
• The Weird Detector: Flagging periodic, coherent signals of arbitrary shape in time series photometry
• New Self-lensing Models of the Small Magellanic Cloud: Can Gravitational Microlensing Detect Extragalactic Exoplanets?
• Transiting Planets with LSST III: Detection Rate per Year of Operation
• Near Ultraviolet Transient Explorer (NUTEx): A CubeSat-Based NUV Imaging Payload for Transient Sky Surveys