TTVs analysis in stars with transiting planets

PETRUCCI, ROMINA

Congreso; Friend of Friends Meeting 2014; 2014

To date, more than 1400 exoplanets have been discovered. Until 2009, most of them were fundamentally detected by radial velocities and transit techniques. After the launch of the space mission Kepler, a new technique became very popular to detect planets: the transit timing variations (TTVs). In a system composed only by a star and a transiting planet, one should expect that the minimum of the transit always occurs at the same time. However, if there is a third body in the system, periodic variations of the period are expected. In this way it is possible to detect other planetary-mass bodies around stars with an already known transiting planet. The less massive the perturber, the smaller the amplitudes of the timing variations, so high precision minimum central times (with errors of around seconds) are required. Besides, as it has been shown in many works, for TTVs analysis it is of crucial relevance to perform the same fitting procedure and error treatment in the studied transit. Taking all this into account, in June of 2011 we started a continuous photometric monitoring of transiting planets host stars in the Southern hemisphere, with the aim of searching for periodic variations in their mid-transit times. We performed our observations with the 40-cm telescope Horacio Ghielmetti (San Juan, Argentina) and the 1.54 mts telescope located in Bosque Alegre (Córdoba, Argentina). In this presentation, we show a full homogeneous analysis of TTVs of two objects of our sample.