Transit detections of extrasolar planets around main-sequence stars

Abstract

Context. The findings of more than 350 extrasolar planets, most of them nontransiting Hot Jupiters, have revealed correlations between the metallicity of the main-sequence (MS) host stars and planetary incidence. This connection can be used to calculate the planet formation probability around other stars, not yet known to have planetary companions. Numerous wide-field surveys have recently been initiated, aiming at the transit detection of extrasolar planets in front of their host stars. Depending on instrumental properties and the planetary distribution probability, the promising transit locations on the celestial plane will differ among these surveys. Aims. We want to locate the promising spots for transit surveys on the celestial plane and strive for absolute values of the expected number of transits in general. Our study will also clarify the impact of instrumental properties such as pixel size, field of view (FOV), and magnitude range on the detection probability. Methods. We used data of the Tycho catalog for ≈1 million objects to locate all the stars with 0 m m V 11.5 m on the celestial plane. We took several empirical relations between the parameters listed in the Tycho catalog, such as distance to Earth, m V , and (B − V), and those parameters needed to account for the probability of a star to host an observable, transiting exoplanet. The empirical relations between stellar metallicity and planet occurrence combined with geometrical considerations were used to yield transit probabilities for the MS stars in the Tycho catalog. Magnitude variations in the FOV were simulated to test whether this fluctuations would be detected by BEST, XO, SuperWASP and HATNet.Results. We present a sky map of the expected number of Hot Jupiter transit events on the basis of the Tycho catalog. Conditioned by the accumulation of stars towards the galactic plane, the zone of the highest number of transits follows the same trace, interrupted by spots of very low and high expectation values. The comparison between the considered transit surveys yields significantly differing maps of the expected transit detections. While BEST provides an unpromising map, those for XO, SuperWASP, and HATNet show FsOV with up to 10 and more expected detections. The sky-integrated magnitude distribution predicts 20 Hot Jupiter transits with orbital periods between 1.5 d and 50 d and m V < 8 m , of which two are currently known. In total, we expect 3412 Hot Jupiter transits to occur in front of MS stars within the given magnitude range. The most promising observing site on Earth is at latitude = −1.

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