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Eccentric Planets & Transit Time Variation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 2008

David M. Kipping
Affiliation:
Dept. of Physics & Astronomy, UCL, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK email: d.kipping@ucl.ac.uk The HOLMES Collaboration
Ignasi Ribas
Affiliation:
Institut de Ciènes de l'Espai (CSIC-IEEE), Campus UAB, 08193, Bellaterra, Spain The HOLMES Collaboration
Andreu Font-Ribera
Affiliation:
Institut de Ciènes de l'Espai (CSIC-IEEE), Campus UAB, 08193, Bellaterra, Spain The HOLMES Collaboration
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Abstract

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For an extrasolar planet on an eccentric orbit, the orbital velocity is constantly changing, even during a planetary transit. This changing orbital velocity will, in general, cause lightcurve assymetry. The asymmetry causes the mid-transit time to be slightly off-centre from the halfway point between transit ingress and egress. For GJ436b, we estimate that the mid-transit time is shifted by 20 seconds. In the case of a system experiencing secular changes, this difference will lead to a long period transit time variation (L-TTV) signal, under the typical definition of the mid-transit time. In this work, we describe the origins of the effect and evaluate it in the case of GJ436b experiencing hypothetical secular changes. We predict L-TTV could be used to map secular changes in such systems.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2009

References

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