A search for orbital decay in southern transiting planets

PETRUCCI, ROMINA; JOFRÉ, EMILIANO; GÓMEZ, MERCEDES

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

So far, of the more than 2000 confirmed exoplanets there are ~ 40 exhibiting very short orbital periods (P < 1.5 days). These extreme and rare systems have raised several questions about their formation and the stability of their current orbits. In this sense, due to the close proximity to their hosts, the star-planet tidal interactions play a key role in the final fate of these systems and it is expected that many of these planets eventually spiral in toward their host-stars. This systematic decreasing in the semimajor axis is called "orbital decay" and can be detected through the long-term photometric follow-up of transiting exoplanets. In this contribution we present 10 new transit observations of a short-period giant planet orbiting an active main-sequence star. The observations were carried out with the 1.54-m telescope at "Estación Astrofísica de Bosque Alegre" and the 0.40-m Horacio Ghielmetti telescope at "Complejo Astronómico El Leoncito", both located in Argentina. Aiming to assess the presence of orbital decay in this extreme system, we combined our light curves with several others from literature and performed a homogeneous analysis spanning 4 years of observations.