A Wide-field Survey for Transiting Hot Jupiters and Eclipsing Pre-main-sequence Binaries in Young Stellar Associations

OELKERS, RYAN J.; MACRI, LUCAS M.; MARSHALL, JENNIFER L.; DEPOY, DARREN L.; LAMBAS, DIEGO G.; COLAZO, CARLOS; STRINGER, KATELYN

ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2016 vol. 152 p. 1 - 15

0004-6256

The past two decades have seen a significant advancement in thedetection, classification, and understanding of exoplanets and binaries.This is due, in large part, to the increase in use of small-aperturetelescopes (<20 cm) to survey large areas of the sky to milli-magprecision with rapid cadence. The vast majority of the planetary andbinary systems studied to date consists of main-sequence or evolvedobjects, leading to a dearth of knowledge of properties at early times(<50 Myr). Only a dozen binaries and one candidate transiting HotJupiter are known among pre-main-sequence objects, yet these are thesystems that can provide the best constraints on stellar formation andplanetary migration models. The deficiency in the number of wellcharacterized systems is driven by the inherent and aperiodicvariability found in pre-main-sequence objects, which can mask and mimiceclipse signals. Hence, a dramatic increase in the number of youngsystems with high-quality observations is highly desirable to guidefurther theoretical developments. We have recently completed aphotometric survey of three nearby (<150 pc) and young (<50 Myr)moving groups with a small-aperture telescope. While our survey reachedthe requisite photometric precision, the temporal coverage wasinsufficient to detect Hot Jupiters. Nevertheless, we discovered 346pre-main-sequence binary candidates, including 74 high-priority objectsfor further study.