A search for orbital decay in southern transiting planets

R. PETRUCCI, E. JOFRÉ, M. GOMEZ

Pasadena

Workshop; 2016 Sagan Exoplanet Summer Workshop: Is There a Planet in My Data? Statistical Approaches to Finding and Characterizing Planets in Astronomical Data; 2016

The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA

To date more than 1650 (exoplanet.eu) exoplanets have been discovered. Among them there is a very particular group with orbital periods < 10 days (or a < 0.1 AU). These are called close-in planets and represent a challenge for theories of planet formation and evolution. Several theoretical works (Levrard at al. 2009; Matsumura et al. 2010; Penev et al. 2012) have demonstrated that many of these close-in planets will spiral in toward their host stars. This systematic decrease of the semimajor axis is known as orbital decay and it is possible to detect it by long-term photometric observations of transiting close-in exoplanets (see for example Birkby et al. 2014; Hoyer et al. 2015, 2016). Taking this into account, we search for a possible orbital decay in the close-in giant planets WASP-46b and WASP-43b which we have been monitoring since June 2011 for TTV analysis.