systemic

Hawaii0
greg posted in worlds on March 11th, 2008

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Over the past two days, I got the opportunity to fly to Hawaii to give two talks for the Keck Observatory’s Evening With Astronomers series. The talks focused on extrasolar planets (here’s a link to the slides in Quicktime format, ~40MB , along with the audio files of (1) a planetary system in a 2:1 resonance, (2) an unstable planetary system, and (3) another unstable system). Both talks were on Kona coast of the Big Island, where, behind the palm trees, Mauna Kea looms up 13,796 feet in the hazy volcanic distance.

The landscape here resembles nothing so much as a habitable, terraformed Mars. Hardened ropes of lava run down to the water’s edge:

In the pre-dawn light this morning, the air was totally silent, and it was easy to imagine that I was actually on Mars, before the water was gone, when a Northern hemispheric ocean lapped up against the lava of the lowermost slopes of Elysium Mons:

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In the last few years the Martian landscape has become much more familiar, as the Spirit and Opportunity rovers crawl across the surface and radio home their photographs:

At Kona, looking out toward the lava fields, the view is positively Martian, with the most immediate difference being a sky that is a hazy blue-white rather than a hazy salmon-white. Here, the Ala Loa trail recedes into the jagged distance of what could easily be Mars:

On Mars, however, one generally has a fairly reasonable sense of what the 360-degree panorama will look like even if only part of the horizon is in view. On Earth, however, the situation can be quite different. Here’s the view that one gets simply by turning and looking in the opposite direction down the Ala Loa trail:

(On a marginally related note, our Alpha Centauri ApJ paper is starting to pick up some news coverage. Here’s a link to a story by National Geographic News.)

And four point five billion years later…2
greg posted in worlds on March 4th, 2008

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The last mile of the San Lorenzo river in Santa Cruz is strongly affected by the twice-daily ebb and flow of the tides.

It’s always startling to see the tidal bore, a solitary breaking wave that runs upstream at a ~8 minute per mile pace when the tide is coming in. The San Lorenzo bore is small, usually six to nine inches high, but dramatic nonetheless. In its wake, there’s a turbulent froth of whitewater, whose eddies eventually cascade into viscous dissipation, turning the kinetic energy of organized flow into a slight heating of the water. As the Moon recedes, the Earth spins down, and the bore expends itself in a swirl of eddies.

The energy that powers the bore was all imparted during the Moon-forming impact, in which a Mars-sized object collided with Earth, leaving the planet violently shaken and stirred and spinning crazily through days that were originally just a few hours long. Now, 4.5 billion years later, the bore running up the river is a distant echo of the impact that was large enough to cause Earth to glow with the temperature of a red dwarf star.

Adapted from: Source.

There’s a nice discussion of tidal bores in the 1899 popular-level book The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System, by Sir G. H. Darwin (son of the naturalist). The book in its entirety can be downloaded from The Internet Archive.

The Moon-forming impact, which occurred somewhere between 10 and 100 million years after the collapse of the pre-solar molecular cloud core, essentially marked the end of terrestrial planet formation in our own solar system. From a dynamical standpoint, a system undergoes a lot of evolution during a time scale of 100 million orbits. By contrast, the Milky Way galaxy is only about 40 orbits old, and is still in an effectively pristine, dynamically unrelaxed configuration.

At Darwin’s time, the first photographs of spiral galaxies were appearing, and there’s a remarkably good photo of the Andromedae galaxy on page 339 of the book:

Darwin writes:

There is good reason for believing that the Nebular Hypothesis presents a true statement in outline of the origin of the solar system, and of the planetary subsystems, because photographs of nebulae have been taken recently in which we can almost see the process in action. Figure 40 is a reproduction of a remarkable photograph by Dr. Isaac Roberts of the great nebula in the constellation of Andromeda. In it we may see the lenticular nebula with its central condensation, the annulation of the outer portions, and even the condensations in the rings which will doubtless at some time form planets. This system is built on a colossal scale, compared with which our solar system is utterly insignificant. Other nebulae show the same thing, and although they are less striking we derive from them good grounds for accepting this theory of evolution as substantially true.

In 1899, the extragalactic distance scale hadn’t been established, and so Darwin thought that M31 was a lot closer than it actually is. In dynamical terms, he would have guessed that it’s many thousands of orbits old rather than only a few dozen. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to think about what will happen to an isolated spiral galaxy by the time it’s 10^18 years old…

Toward Alpha Cen B b22
greg posted in exoplanet detection, worlds on February 24th, 2008

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Yesterday, I gave a talk at the JPL Exoplanet Science and Technology Fair, a one-day meeting that showcased the remarkably broad variety of extrasolar planet-related research being carried out at JPL. In keeping with the wide array of projects, the agenda was fast-paced and completely diverse, with talks on theory, observation, instrumentation, and mission planning.

The moment I walked into the auditorium, I was struck by the out-there title on one of the posters: The Ultimate Project: 500 Years Until Phase E, from Sven Grenander and Steve Kilston. Their poster (pdf version here) gives a thumbnail sketch of how a bona-fide journey to a nearby habitable planet might be accomplished. The audacious basic stats include: 1 million travelers, 100 million ton vessel, USD 50 trillion, and a launch date of 2500 CE.

Fifty trillion dollars, which is roughly equivalent to one year of the World GDP, seems surprisingly, perhaps even alarmingly cheap. The Ultimate Project has a website, and for always-current perspective on interstellar travel, it pays to read Paul Gilster’s Centauri Dreams weblog.

Interest in interstellar travel would ramp up if a truly Earth-like world were discovered around one of the Sun’s nearest stellar neighbors. Alpha Centauri, 4.36 light years distant, has the unique allure. Last year, I wrote a series of posts [1, 2, 3, 4] that explored the possibility that a habitable world might be orbiting Alpha Centauri B. In short, the current best-guess theory for planet formation predicts that there should be terrestrial planets orbiting both stars in the Alpha Cen binary. In the absence of non-gaussian stellar radial velocity noise sources, these planets would be straightforward to detect with a dedicated telescope capable of 3 m/s velocity precision.

Over the past year, we’ve done a detailed study that fleshes out the ideas in those original oklo posts. The work was led by UCSC graduate student Javiera Guedes and includes Eugenio, Erica Davis, myself, Elisa Quintana and Debra Fischer as co-authors. We’ve just had a paper accepted by the Astrophysical Journal that describes the research. Javiera will be posting the article to astro-ph in the next day or so, but in the meantime, here is a .pdf version.

Here’s a diagram that shows the sorts of planetary systems one should expect around Alpha Cen B. The higher metallicity of the star in comparison to the Sun leads to terrestrial planets that are somewhat more massive.

We’re envisioning an all-out Doppler RV campaign on the Alpha Cen System. If the stars present gaussian noise, then with 3 m/s, one can expect a very strong detection after collecting data for five years:

Here’s a link to an animation on Javiera’s project website which shows how a habitable planet can literally jump out of the periodogram.

I think the planets are there. The main question in my opinion is whether the stellar noise spectrum is sufficiently Gaussian. It’s worth a try to have a look…

two for one deals?5
greg posted in worlds on February 12th, 2008

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The Gliese 876 system is remarkable for a number of reasons. It makes a mockery of the notion that the minimum-mass solar nebula has a universal validity. It harbors one of the lowest-mass extrasolar planets known (discovered by our own Eugenio Rivera). And of course, the outer two planets are famously caught in a 2:1 mean motion resonance, in which the inner 0.8 Jupiter-mass planet makes (on average) exactly two trips around the red dwarf for every one trip made by the outer 2.5 Jupiter-mass planet.

As users of the console know, the planet-planet interactions between the Gliese 876 planets are strong enough so that one needs a self-consistent dynamical fit to the system. Even on the timescale of a single outer planet orbit, the failure of the Keplerian model can be seen on a 450-pixel wide .gif image:

The following three frames are from a time-lapse .mpg animation of the Gliese 876 system over a period of roughly one hundred years:

Each frame strobes the orbital motion of the planets at 50 equally spaced intervals which subdivide the P~60 day period of the outer planet. Upon watching the movie, it’s clear that the apsidal lines of the outer two planets are swinging back and forth like a pendulum. This oscillation has an amplitude (or libration width) of 29 degrees, and acts like a fingerprint identifier of the Gliese 876 system.

The derangement of the orbits is reflected in their continual inability to maintain an exact 2:1 orbital commensurability. The first figure up above shows that when planet c has finished exactly two orbits, it has already managed to lap planet b, which was still dawdling down Boardwalk prior to passing GO.

Planet b, however, doesn’t always run slow. The gravitational perturbations between the two planets provide a second pendulum-like restoring action which prevents the bodies from straying from the average period ratio of 2:1, which, over the long term, is maintained exactly. The degree to which the orbits themselves librate, combined with the planets’ abilities to run either ahead or behind exact commensurability is captured by the resonant arguments of the configuration. These can be defined as,

where the lambdas are mean longitudes and the curly pi’s are the longitudes of periastron. The two resonant arguments capture the simultaneous libration of the mean motions and the apsidal lines. The smaller the arguments, the more tightly the system is in resonance.

In the Gliese 876 system, the resonant arguments are both librating with amplitudes of less than 30 degrees. This is evidence that a dissipative mechanism was at work during the formation of the system. Interestingly, however, when one looks at the other extrasolar planetary systems that are thought to be in 2:1 resonance, one finds that the libration amplitudes in every case are much larger. In fact, in the HD 73526 system and in the HD 128311 system, only one of the arguments is librating, while the other is circulating. In this state of affairs, the apsidal lines act like a pendulum that is swinging over the top. In addition, the orbital eccentricites are higher, and the sum of planet-planet activity is strikingly greater (see this animation of the evolution of the HD 128311 system).

A gas disk seems to be the most likely mechanism for pushing a planetary system into mean-motion resonance. Protoplanetary disks are likely, however to experience turbulent density fluctuations. These density fluctuations lead to stochastic gravitational torques, which provide a steady source of orbital perturbations to any planets that are embedded in a disk. For a reasonable spectrum of turbulent fluctuations, it turns out that it’s rather difficult to wind up with a planetary system that is as deeply in resonance as Gliese 876. The conclusion, then, is that Gliese 876-like configurations should be quite rare. Indeed, 2:1 resonances of every stripe should constitute only a minor fraction of planetary systems, and the majority that do exist should either large libration widths or only a single argument in resonance.

If you’re interested in more detail, we’ve submitted a paper that goes into much more detail (Adams, Laughlin & Bloch, ApJ, 2008 Submitted).

436 again5
greg posted in exoplanet detection on January 22nd, 2008

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There’s a provocative paper up on the astro-ph today. Ignasi Ribas and two collaborators are reporting the “possible discovery” of a 4.8 Earth mass planet in an exterior 2:1 mean motion resonance with the transiting hot Neptune Gliese 436b. Planet four three six b is the well-known subject of great consternation, great scientific value, and many an oklo.org post. (For the chronological storyline, see: 1 (for background), 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.)

Here’s the basic idea. Ribas et al. note that a single-planet fit to the Maness et al. (2007) radial velocity data set (which is listed as gj_436_M07K on the systemic console) has a peak in the residuals periodogram at P~5.1866 days:

Using this periodogram peak as a starting point, they get a keplerian 2-planet fit that lowers the reduced chi-square from ~4.7 to ~3.7. They then point out that this detection can potentially be confirmed by measuring variations in transit timing. In their picture, the presently-grazing transit has come into visibility only within the last 2.5 years or so, as a result of orbital precession. The transit light curve should thus be showing significant variations in duration as well as deviations from a strictly periodic sequence of central transit times.

This will be a huge big deal if the claim holds up. For starters, it’ll provide a natural explanation for Gl 436b’s outsize eccentricity. And everyone’s been on the lookout for a strongly resonant transiting system with a short orbital period. For the time being, though, I’m withholding judgment. As a first point of concern, Ribas et al. are presenting a keplerian fit to the radial velocities. Yet for the orbital configuration they are proposing, it’s absolutely vital to take planet-planet interactions into account. One can see this by entering their fit into the console. (Use a mean anomaly at the first RV epoch 2451552.077 for planet b=40.441 deg, corresponding to their reported time of periastron of Tp_b=HJD 2451551.78, and a mean anomaly for planet c=268.14 deg, corresponding to their reported value of Tp_c=HJD 2451553.4.) One can also dial in a long-term trend if one wants, but this isn’t necessary. Once the fit is entered, the reduced chi-square is 3.7. Activate integration. (Hermite 4th-order is the faster method.) When the planets are integrated, their mutual interactions utterly devastate the fit, driving the reduced chi-square up to 85.018. Using the zoomer and the scroller, you’ll see that the integrated radial velocity curve and the keplerian curve start off as a good match, but then rapidly get completely out of phase.

In order to examine the plausibility of a two-planet fit in 2:1 mean motion resonance, one needs to fit the radial velocity data with integration turned on. It is also important to include the existing transit timing data in the fit (and to do this, it’s best to use the most recent, so-called unstable version of the console). Over at Bruce Gary’s amateur exoplanet archive (AXA), there are now three transit timing measurements listed, with the latest obtained by Bruce himself this past New Years Eve. The HJD measurements of central transit should be added to the gj436.tds file, along with the HJD 2454280.78149 +/- 0.00016 central transit time measured by Spitzer.

Ideally, the Spitzer secondary transit timing data should also be included, but at the moment, the distribution version of the console does not have the capability to incorporate secondary transit measurements. One approach would be to get a self-consistent fit, and then see whether the epoch of secondary transit matches that observed by Spitzer.

Have fun…

Messenger4
greg posted in worlds on January 20th, 2008

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Messenger flew by Mercury last week, and photographed vast swaths of terrain that, until now, had never been seen. The new landscapes, as expected, are cratered, barren, and utterly moonlike. The galaxy could contain a hundred billion planets that would be hard, at first glance, to distinguish from Mercury, and within our cosmic horizon, there are probably of order as many Mercury-like worlds as there are sucrose molecules in a cube of sugar.

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Nevertheless, we do gain something extraordinary whenever a new vista onto a terrestrial world is opened up. Galileo was the first to achieve this, when he turned his telescope to the Moon and saw its three-dimensional relief for the first time. Mariner 4 and Mariner 9 accomplished a similar feat for Mars. The Magellan spacecraft revealed the Venusian topography. And once Messenger has photographed the full surface of Mercury, there will be a profoundly significant interval before we get our next up-close view of an unmapped terrestrial planet. My guess is that it’ll be Alpha Centauri B b.

The Messenger website is well worth a visit. I was particularly struck by the movie that the spacecraft made of the Earth during the close fly by of March 2005. During the course of 24 hours, the spinning Earth recedes into the black velvet distance and space travel seems like the real thing.

Mercury’s orbit, with its 88 day period and its eccentricity of 0.2 could slip unnoticed into the distribution of known exoplanets. It’s vaguely comparable, for example, with the orbit of HD 37605 b. This Msini=2.3 Mjup gas giant has an apoastron distance similar to Mercury’s, but dives much closer to its star during periastron.

We’ve been interested in HD 37605 b lately because its orbit dips in and out of the insolation zone where water clouds are expected to exist. At the far point of the 55 day orbit, it should be possible for white clouds to form out of a clear steamy atmosphere. At close approach, the clouds are turning to steam.

Jonathan Langton’s models for this planet show persistent polar vortices, which sequester cooler air, and which may remain cloudy even during the hot days surrounding periastron. The vortices are tenaciously long-lived, and tracer particles seeded into the vortices leak out only slowly. It would be interesting to know what sort of chemistry is brewing in the steamy hothouse environment of trapped and noxious air.

Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis!2
greg posted in worlds on January 15th, 2008

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On the UCSC Science Library shelves, we have an 1828 edition of Pierre Simon de Laplace’s Oeuvres that includes the five-volume Mécanique Céleste. At moments like this, it’s great to have a camera on one’s cellphone:

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Laplace’s identification of the 5:2 near-resonance between Jupiter and Saturn allowed him to augment the exisiting second-order Laplace-Lagrange secular analysis to produce a theory of planetary motion that was in extraordinary agreement with the observations of the late eighteenth century. His success in explaining the so-called Great Inequality was likely a contributing factor in the development the concept of Laplacian determinism, of a clockwork universe.

In 1802, during William Herschel’s visit to Paris, Herschel and Laplace had a meeting with Napoleon, who, like Thomas Jefferson, appears to have been not much taken with a system of the world created and dictated by natural law:

The first Consul then asked a few questions relating to Astronomy and the construction of the heavens to which I made such answers as seemed to give him great satisfaction. He also addressed himself to Mr. Laplace on the same subject, and held a considerable argument with him in which he differed from that eminent mathematician. The difference was occasioned by an exclamation of the first Consul, who asked in a tone of exclamation or admiration (when we were speaking of the extent of the sidereal heavens): ‘And who is the author of all this!’ Mons. De la Place wished to shew that a chain of natural causes would account for the construction and preservation of the wonderful system. This the first Consul rather opposed.

[Source: Herschel’s diary of his visit to Paris in 1802, as found in C. Lubbock’s _The Herschel Chronicle_, p. 310, see here for a nice background.]

I like the extrasolar planet game because it’s simultaneously up-to-the-minute and steeped in tradition. With systems like Gliese 876, we’re approaching roughly the same effective degree of refinement in our detection of planet-planet orbital perturbations that was possible in the late eighteenth century for Jupiter and Saturn. As a result, someone like Laplace, were he to materialize (see today’s NYT) in the Interdisciplinary Sciences Building here at UCSC, could roll up his french cuffs and immediately begin contributing publishable work. The same would certainly not be true if one of his equally luminous scientific contemporaries, say Antoine Lavoisier, were to suddenly walk in to a modern-day chemistry lab.

Will be making an effort to post more frequently. Thanks for your continued readership and participation as oklo.org heads into its third year.

transit valuations18
greg posted in exoplanet detection on December 24th, 2007

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Discoveries relating to transiting extrasolar planets often make the news. This is in keeping both with the wide public interest in extrasolar planets, as well as the effectiveness of the media-relations arms of the agencies, organizations, and universities that facilitate research on planets. I therefore think that funding support for research into extrasolar planets in general, and transiting planets in particular, is likely to be maintained, even in the face of budget cuts in other areas of astronomy and physics. There’s an article in Saturday’s New York Times which talks about impending layoffs at Fermilab, where the yearly budget has just been cut from $342 million to $320 million. It’s often not easy to evaluate how much a particular scientific result is “worth” in terms of a dollar price tag paid by the public, and Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance has a good post on this topic.

For the past two years, the comments sections for my oklo.org posts have presented a rather staid, low-traffic forum of discussion. That suddenly changed with Thursday’s post. The discussion suddenly heated up, with some of the readers suggesting that the CoRoT press releases are hyped up in relation to the importance of their underlying scientific announcements.

How much, actually, do transit discoveries cost? Overall, of order a billion dollars has been committed to transit detection, with most of this money going to CoRoT and Kepler. If we ignore the two spacecraft and look at the planets found to date, then this sum drops to something like 25 million dollars. (Feel free to weigh in with your own estimate and your pricing logic if you think this is off base.)

The relative value of a transit depends on a number of factors. After some revisions and typos (see comment section for this post) I’m suggesting the following valuation formula for the cost, C, of a transit:

The terms here are slightly subjective, but I think that the overall multiplicative effect comes pretty close to the truth.

The normalization factor of 580 million out front allows the total value of transits discovered to date to sum to 25 million dollars. The exponential term gives weight to early discoveries. It’s a simple fact that were HD 209458 b discovered today, nobody would party like its 1999 — I’ve accounted for this with an e-folding time of 5 years in the valuation.

Bright transits are better. Each magnitude in V means a factor of 2.5x more photons. My initial inclination was to make transit value proportional to stellar flux (and I still think this is a reasonable metric). The effect on the dimmer stars, though was simply overwhelming. Of order 6 million dollars worth of HST time was spent to find the SWEEPS transits, and with transit value proportional to stellar flux, this assigned a value of two dollars to SWEEPS-11. That seems a little harsh. Also, noise goes as root N.

Longer period transits are much harder to detect, and hence more valuable. Pushing into the habitable zone also seems like the direction that people are interested in going, and so I’ve assigned value in proportion to the square root of the orbital period. (One could alternately drop the square root.)

Eccentricity is a good thing. Planets on eccentric orbits can’t be stuck in synchronous rotation, and so their atmospheric dynamics, and the opportunities they present for interesting follow-up studies make them worth more when they transit.

Less massive planets are certainly better. I’ve assigned value in inverse proportion to mass.

Finally, small stars are better. A small star means a larger transit depth for a planet of given size, which is undeniably valuable. I’ve assigned value in proportion to transit depth, and I’ve also added a term, Np^2, that accounts for the fact that a transiting planet in a multiple-planet system is much sought-after. Np is the number of known planets in the system. Here are the results:

HD 209458 b is the big winner, as well it should be. The discovery papers for this planet are scoring hundreds of citations per year. It essentially launched the whole field. The STIS lightcurve is an absolute classic. Also highly valued are Gliese 436b, and HD 189733b. No arguing with those calls.

Only two planets seem obviously mispriced. Surely, it can’t be true that HAT-P-1 b is 10 times more valuable than HAT-P-2b? I’d gladly pay $85,507 for HAT-P-2b, and I’d happily sell HAT-P-1b for $969,483 and invest the proceeds in the John Deere and Apple Computer corporations.

Jocularity aside, a possible conclusion is that you should detect your transits from the ground and do your follow up from space — at least until you get down to R<2 Earth radii. At that point, I think a different formula applies.

CoRoT-exo-2 c?14
greg posted in systemic faq, exoplanet detection on December 21st, 2007

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The CoRoT mission announced their second transiting planet today, and it’s a weird one. The new planet has a mass of 3.53 Jupiter masses, a fleeting 1.7429964 day orbit, and a colossal radius. It’s fully 1.43 times larger than Jupiter.

The surface temperature on this planet is likely well above 1500K. Our baseline theoretical models predict that the radius of the planet should be ~1.13 Jupiter radii, which is much smaller than observed. Interestingly, however, if one assumes that a bit more than 1% of the stellar flux is deposited deep in the atmosphere, then the models suggest that the planet could easily be swollen to its observed size.

The surest way to heat up a planet is via forcing from tidal interactions with other, as-yet unknown planets in the system. If that’s what’s going on with CoRoT-exo-2 b, then it’s possible that the perturber can be detected via transit timing. The downloadable systemic console is capable of fitting to transit timing variations in conjunction with the radial velocity data. All that’s needed is a long string of accurate central transit times.

The parent star for CoRoT-exo-2-b is relatively small (0.94 solar radii) which means that the transit is very deep, of order 2.3%. That means good signal to noise. At V=12.6, the star should be optimally suited for differential photometry by observers with small telescopes. With a fresh transit occurring every 41 and a half hours, data will build up quickly. As soon as the coordinates are announced, observers should start bagging transits of this star and submitting their results to Bruce Gary’s Amateur Exoplanet Archive. (See here for a tutorial on using the console to do transit timing analyses.)

6 Gigabytes. Two Stars. One Planet.6
greg posted in exoplanet detection, worlds on December 14th, 2007

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Another long gap between posts. I’m starting to dig out from under my stack, however, and there’ll soon be some very interesting items to report.

As mentioned briefly in the previous post, our Spitzer observations of HD 80606 did indeed occur as scheduled. Approximately 7,800 8-micron 256×256 px IRAC images of the field containing HD 80606 and its binary companion HD 80607 were obtained during the 30-hour interval surrounding the periastron passage. On Nov. 22nd, the data (totaling a staggering 6 GB) was down-linked to the waiting Earth-based radio telescopes of NASA’s Deep Space Network. By Dec 4th, the data had cleared the Spitzer Science Center’s internal pipeline.

We’re living in a remarkable age. When I was in high school, I specifically remember standing out the backyard in the winter, scrutinizing the relatively sparse fields of stars in Ursa Major with my new 20×80 binoculars, and wondering whether any of them had planets. Now, a quarter century on, it’s possible to write and electronically submit a planetary observation proposal on a laptop computer, and then, less than a year later, 6 GB of data from a planet orbiting one of the stars visible in my binoculars literally rains down from the sky.

It will likely take a month or so before we’re finished with the analysis and the interpretation of the data. The IRAC instrument produces a gradually increasing sensitivity with time (known to the cognescenti as “the ramp”). This leads to a raw photometric light curve that slopes upward during the first hours of observation. For example, here’s the raw photometry from our Gliese 436 observations that Spitzer made last Summer. The ramp dominates the time series (although the secondary eclipse can also be seen):

The ramp differs in height, shape, and duration from case to case, but it is a well understood instrumental effect, and so its presence can be modeled out. Drake Deming is a world expert on this procedure, and so the data is in very capable hands. Once the ramp is gone, we’ll have a 2800-point 30 hour time series for both HD 80606 and HD 80607. We’ll be able to immediately see whether a secondary transit occurred (1 in 6.66 chance), and with more work, we’ll be able to measure how fast the atmosphere heats up during the periastron passage. Jonathan Langton is running a set of hydrodynamical simulations with different optical and infrared opacities, and we’ll be able to use these to get a full interpretation of the light curve.

In another exciting development, Joe Lazio, Paul Shankland, David Blank and collaborators were able to successfully observe HD 80606 using the VLA during the Nov. 19-20 periastron encounter! It’s not hard to imagine that there might be very interesting aurora-like effects that occur during the planet’s harrowing periastron passage. If so, the planet might have broadcasted significant power on the decameter band. Rest assured that when that when their analysis is ready, we’ll have all the details here at oklo.org.

planet per week7
greg posted in exoplanet detection on November 30th, 2007

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As the academic quarter draws to a close, it gets harder to keep up a regular posting schedule. This year, certainly, the difficulty has nothing to do with a lack of exciting developments associated with extrasolar planets.

A few unrelated items:

It appears that the HD 80606b Spitzer observations went smoothly, and that the data has been safely transmitted to Earth via NASA’s Deep Space Network. It is currently in the processing pipeline at the Spitzer Science Center. When it clears the pipeline, the analysis can start.

Back in September, I wrote a post about Bruce Gary’s Amateur Exoplanet Archive. This is a web-based repository for photometric transit observations by amateurs. With the number of known transits growing by the month, there’s a planet in transit nearly all of the time. Over 90 light curves have been submitted to the archive thus far. For transiting planets such as HD 189733b or HD 209458b, which have significant numbers of published radial velocity data, it’s very interesting to take the transit center measurements from Bruce’s archive and use them as additional orbital constraints within the console. The September post gives a tutorial on how to do this.

It really is turning out to be a banner year for extrasolar planets. As we head into December, this year is averaging more than one planet per week. The detection rate is more than double that of the previous four years.

The plot above gives a hint that Saturn-mass planets might wind up being fairly rare, as one might expect from the zeroth-order version of the core accretion theory. (For more information, this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 of oklo posts compares and contrasts the gravitational instability and core accretion theories for giant planet formation.)
Also, if you give talks, here’s a larger version of the above figure.

Another interesting diagram is obtained by plotting orbital period vs. year of discovery:

It’s possible that this diagram might be hinting that true Jupiter analogs are relatively rare. Could be that the disks around metal-rich stars are able to form Jovian mass planets and then migrate them in, while stars with subsolar metallicity form ice giants beyond the ice line. In this scenario, our solar system lies right on the boundary between the two outcomes.

It could also be the case that there are a whole slew of true-Jupiter analogs just on the verge of being announced. Time will tell.

And as always, it’s interesting to spend time with the correlation diagram tool over at exoplanet.eu.

160 basis points6
greg posted in exoplanet detection on November 25th, 2007

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It’s sometimes a little weird to realize that my daily schedule is dictated by the orbits of alien planets. HD 80606b went through periastron passage at 07:00 UT last Tuesday, with the Spitzer Space Telescope’s rattlesnake’s eye vision trained intently upon it. Over the past few days, it’s been hurtling away from the star, gradually reducing its velocity as it climbs up the gravitational potential well of the star.

At 07:45 UT on Monday morning, HD 80606b is scheduled to go through inferior conjunction. In the 1.6% a-priori geometric chance that the orbital plane of the planet is in near-perfect alignment with the line of sight to the solar system, then it will be possible to observe the planet in transit. The 1.6% transit probability is fairly high for a planet with a period of 111 days, but much lower than the 15% probability that a secondary eclipse can be observed. If the planet is undergoing secondary eclipse, then we’ll know as soon as the Spitzer data comes in.

Back in early 2005, Transitsearch.org coordinated a campaign to check for transits of HD 80606b. At that time, there were fewer radial velocities available, and so the transit window was less well constrained. A number of observers got data, and there was no sign of transit, but the coverage was not good enough to rule out a transit. I’m thus encouraging observers to monitor HD 80606 during the next 48 hours on the off chance that it can be observed in transit. Given the small chance involved, it seems appropriate to refer to the transit probability in terms of basis points. As in, “In ‘05, we got about 40 basis points. That means there’s still 120 basis points out there to collect.”

HD 80606 is a visual binary. The companion, HD 80607, provides a good comparison star in telescopes with a large enough aperture under good seeing conditions. For most observers, however, the light from the two stars is combined. A transit by HD 80606b is expected to have a depth of order 1.4%, and (if its a central transit) will last about 14 hours. It’s a long-shot for sure, but worthwhile and fun nonetheless.

Got the ‘606 kickin’ & the 436 written2
greg posted in exoplanet detection on November 20th, 2007

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As I write this, it’s JD 2454425.219 (17:16 UT, Nov. 20 2007). HD 80606 b whipped through periastron a little more than 10 hours ago, and the Spitzer Space telescope is literally just finishing its 31-hour observation of the event. Next comes the downlink of the data to Earth on the Deep Space Network, and then the analysis. Definitely exciting!

The Spitzer Space Telescope is scheduled to run out of cryogen in early 2009. When the telescope heats up, we’ll lose our best platform for mid-infrared observations of hot extrasolar planets, and so there was a palpable urgency last week as everyone prepared their proposals to meet the submission deadline for Spitzer’s last general observing cycle. During the next few years, there is going to be intense development of detailed 3D radiation-hydrodynamical models for simulating the time-dependent surface flows on extrasolar planets. These models will need contact points with hard data. It’s thus vital to bank as wide a variety of observations of as wide a variety of actual planets under as wide variety of different conditions as possible. A number of fascinating exoplanet observing proposals were submitted last week by a variety of highly competent teams. I’m urging that they all be accepted!

Most of the exoplanet observations that have been done with Spitzer have focused on tidally locked transiting planets on circular orbits. HD 189733b, HD 209458b, TrES-1 and HD 149026b are the flagship examples of this class. In the past year, however, eccentric transiting planets have started turning up. Gliese 436b (e=0.15) was the first, followed by HAT-P-2b (e=0.5), and HD 17156b (e=0.67).

Drake Deming, Jonathan Langton and I decided that the most interesting proposal that we could make would be for Gliese 436 b. This is the Neptune-mass, Neptune-sized planet transiting a nearby red dwarf star. Here’s the to-scale diagram of the 2.644-day orbit:

After Gliese 436b was discovered to transit last spring, it triggered a Joe Harrington’s standing Target of Opportunity program. Both a primary and a secondary transit were observed (see this post) which confirmed the startlingly high eccentricity, and which allowed an estimate of the planet’s temperature (or, more precisely, the 8-micron brightness temperature). This turned out to be 712±36 K, which is significantly higher than the ~650 K baseline prediction.

The hotter-than-expected temperature measurement could arise from a number of different effects (or combinations of effects). By measuring the secondary eclipse, you strobe one hemisphere of the planet. If there are significant temperature variations across the surface of the planet, then a high reading might arise from chancing on the hotter side of the planet. Alternately, the effective temperature implied by measuring the energy coming out at 8-microns could be seriously skewed if the spectrum of the planet has deep absorption or emission bands at the 8-micron wavelength. Another possibility is that we’re observing tidal heating in action. Gliese 436b is being worked pretty hard in its eccentric orbit, and it should be generating quite a bit of interior luminosity as a result. If its structure is similar to Neptune, then a 712K temperature is completely understandable.

Io, of course, is subject to a similar situation. Here’s a K-band infrared photo of Io in transit in front of Jupiter:

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Gliese 436b is in pseudo-synchronous rotation, and spins on its axis every ~2.3 days. The eccentricity of the orbit leads to an 83% variation in the amount of light received from the star over a 1.3 day timescale. This leads to a complicated flow pattern on the surface.

Here’s what Jonathan Langton’s model predicts for the appearance of the hemisphere facing Earth at five successive secondary eclipses:

Globally, the hydrodynamical model produces a statistically steady-state flow pattern that is dominated by a persistent eastward equatorial jet with a zonally averaged speed of ~150 meters per second. This eastward flow in the planet’s frame produces a light curve in the lab frame that has a ~3 day periodicity. This period is significantly longer than both the planet’s orbital period and the planet’s spin period. Our Spitzer proposal is to observe a sequence of 8 secondary transits in hopes of confirming both the amplitude and the periodicity of this light curve.

It’s certainly the case that our current hydrodynamical model is not the definitive explanation of what these planets are doing. I won’t be at all surprised if the flux variation from eclipse to eclipse is more complicated than what we predict. I’m highly convinced, however, that the model is good enough to indicate that the situation on Gliese 436b will be interesting, dynamic, and complex. The actual variation in the real observations will provide an interesting and non-trivial constraint that a definitive model of the planet will need to satisfy. The observations, if approved, will thus be of great use to everyone in the business of constructing GCMs for short period planets.

Stay tuned…

55 Cancri - A tough nut to crack.5
greg posted in exoplanet detection, worlds on November 13th, 2007

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As soon as the new data sets for 55 Cancri from the Keck and Lick Observatories were made public last week, they were added to the downloadable systemic console and to the systemic backend. The newly released radial velocities can be combined with existing published data from both ELODIE and HET.

Just as we’d hoped, the systemic backend users got right down to brass tacks. As anyone who has gone up against 55 Cnc knows, it is the Gangkhar Puensum of radial velocity data sets. There are four telescopes, hundreds of velocities, a nearly twenty year baseline, and a 2.8 day inner periodicity. Keplerian models, furthermore, can’t provide fully definitive fits to the data. Planet-planet gravitational perturbations need to be taken into account to fully resolve the system.

Eugenio has specified a number of different incarnations of the data set. It’s generally thought that fits to partial data sets will be useful for building up to a final definitive fit. Here’s a snapshot of the current situation on the backend:

The “55cancriup_4datasets” aggregate contains all of the published data for all four telescopes. This is therefore the dataset that is most in need of being fully understood. The best fit so far has been provided by Mike Hall, who submitted on Nov. 9th. After I wrote to congratulate him, he replied,

Thanks Greg, […] It actually slipped into place very easily. About 13-30 minutes of adding planets and polishing with simple Keplerian, then 25 iterations overnight with Hermite 4th Order.

The problem is that it seemed like I was getting sucked into a very deep chi^2 minimum, so getting alternative fits may be tricky!

Here’s a detail from his fit which illustrates the degree of difference between the Keplerian and the full dynamical model:

and here’s a thumbnail of the inner configuration of the system. It’s basically a self-consistent version of the best 5-Keplerian fit.

Mike’s fit has a reduced chi-square of 7.72. This would require a Gaussian stellar jitter of 6.53 m/s in order to drop the reduced chi-square to unity. Yet 55 Cancri is an old, inherently quiet star, and so I think it’s possible, even likely, that there is still a considerable improvement to be had. It’s just not clear how to make the breakthrough happen.

This situation is thus what we’ve been hoping for all along with the systemic collaboration: A world-famous star, a high-quality highly complex published data set, a tough unsolved computational problem, and the promise of a fascinating dynamical insight if the problem can be solved.

I’ll end with two comments posted by the frontline crew (Eric Diaz, Mike Hall, Petej, and Chris Thiessen) that I found quite striking. These are part of a very interesting discussion that’s going on right now inside the backend.

When something is this difficult to solve using the ordinary approaches, I start to look to improbable and difficult solutions. In the case of 55C, my hunch is that it’s a system where the integration is necessary, but not sufficient to build a correct solution. I think that the parameter space of solutions is so chaotic that the L-M minimization doesn’t explore it well, or that the inclination of the system is significant enough to skew the planet-to-planet interactions in the console, or both. Trojans or horseshoe orbits would fit these conditions. Perhaps other resonant or eccentric orbits would as well.

I think the high chi square results and flat periodograms after fitting the known planets also point to a 1:1 resonant solution or significant inclination. I just don’t think there’s enough K left to fit another significant planet unless it’s highly interactive with the others.

I’m going to keep working on this system in the hopes that we can find a solution (and because it’s really, really fun), but I suspect that a satisfactory answer won’t be found without a systematic search of the parameter space including inclination.

– Chris

“Nature is not stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine.” Or words to that effect, I can’t remember who said that but in all probability this system shall have more questions answered about it (or not as is often the case!) by direct imaging e.g. such as by the Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission to show what is really happening (if it is ever launched). The 55 Cancri system is listed as 63 on the top TPF 100 target stars.

In the meantime, we struggle on… I don’t think I can add anything else to what Eric and everyone else has said…

– Petej

The latest on 55 Cancri7
greg posted in systemic faq, exoplanet detection on November 6th, 2007

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Here’s a development that systemic regulars will find interesting! In a press release today, came announcement of the detection of a fifth planet in the 55 Cancri system (paper here). The new planet has an Msin(i) of 0.144 Jupiter masses, a 260-day orbital period and a low eccentricity. The detection is based on a really amazing set of additions to the Lick and Keck radial velocities:

For background on the 55 Cancri system, check out this oklo.org post from December 2005.

The outer four planets in the 55 Cancri system all have fairly low eccentricities in the new five-planet model. This leads to a diminished importance for planet-planet interactions, but nevertheless, the system does require a fully integrated fit. Deviations between the Keplerian and integrated models arise primarily from the orbital precessions of planets b, c, and e that occur during the long time frame spanned by the radial velocity observations.

Eugenio has added the velocities onto a fully updated version of the downloadable systemic console. The new version of the console adds a wide variety of new features (including dynamical transit timing) that were formerly available only on the unstable distribution. Check it out, and see the latest news on the console change log and the backend discussion forum. Over the next month, we’ll be talking in detail about the new features on the updated console.

Very shortly, a new entries corresponding to the updated 55 Cancri data sets will be added to the “Real Stars” catalog on the systemic backend. I’ll then upload my baseline integrated 5-planet fit to the joint Keck-Lick data set. I’m almost certain that with some computational work, this baseline model can be improved. Such a task is not for the squeamish, however. Obtaining self-consistent 6-body models to the 55 Cancri data set is a formidable computational task for the console. There are 29 parameters to vary (if the Lick, Keck, ELODIE and HET radial velocity data sets are all included). The inner planet orbits every 2.79 days, and the data spans nearly two decades. Fortunately, Hermite integration is now available on the console. Hermite integration speeds things up by roughly a factor of ten in comparison to Runge Kutta integration.

There have been hints of the 260-day planet for a number of years now because it presents a clear peak in the residuals periodogram. After the 2004 announcement of planet “e” in its short-period 2.8 day orbit, Jack Wisdom of MIT circulated a paper that argued against the existence of planet “e”, and simultaneously argued that there was evidence for a 260-day planet in the data available at that time. More recently, a number of very nice fully self consistent fits to the available data have been submitted to the backend (by, e.g., users thiessen, EricFDiaz, and flanker). Their fits all contain both the 2.8 day and the 260-day planets, and happily, are fully consistent with the new system configuration based on the updated velocities. Congratulations, guys!

Interestingly, the best available self-consistent fits to the system indicate that planets b and c do not have any of the 3:1 resonant arguments in libration. It will be interesting to see whether this continues to be the case as the new fits roll into the systemic backend.

Jonathan Langton’s new paper (available now!)1
greg posted in worlds on November 5th, 2007

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The Spitzer telescope recently observed HAT-P-2b (data not yet analyzed) and the Nov. 19-20th encounter with HD 80606b is coming right up. No better time, then, to go out on a limb with our predictions of what will be seen. Our latest paper (Langton & Laughlin 2007) has been accepted by the Astrophysical Journal, and will be posted to astro-ph shortly. In the meantime, here’s a .pdf file containing the full paper. We’re happy with the way it came out, and we’re working hard to push the models to the next level.

From the conclusion:

A short-period Jovian planet on an eccentric orbit likely presents one of the Galaxy’s most thrilling sights. One can imagine, for example, how HD 86060 b appears during the interval surrounding its hair-rising encounter with its parent star. The blast of periastron heating drives global shock waves that reverberate several times around the globe. From Earth’s line of sight, the hours and days following periastron are characterized by a gradually dimming crescent of reflected starlight, accompanied by planet-wide vortical storms that fade like swirling embers as the planet recedes from the star. It’s remarkable that we now have the ability to watch this scene (albeit at one-pixel and two-frequency resolution) from a vantage several hundred light years away.

trying to keep up to date5
greg posted in Uncategorized on November 1st, 2007

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This has not been the best month to get swamped with work and as a result essentially ignore my extrasolar planet weblog. The discoveries have been coming thick and fast, and many of them have some very interesting ramifications. So I’m going to make an effort to get back to a regular schedule of posts.

Staying up-to-the-minute on extrasolar planets can involve quite a bit of work. Fortunately, for the past year, Mike Valdez has been combing astro-ph each day as soon as the new mailings are released. He applies a strict standard of applicability to select the papers relevant to extrasolar planets, and reports the most interesting ones here on the systemic backend. I recommend this service to everyone.

HAT P-5b, WASP-3, OGLE-TR182b, WASP-4, HAT P-6b, WASP-5. Man. It seems like the transit detection rate is ramping up significantly. In all probability, the bottleneck is now the pace of RV confirmation with 8-meter class telescopes, rather than any shortage of transits themselves. It’ll be very interesting to see what the correlation diagrams and the planet catalog looks like one year from now.

Earlier this month, Ruth Murray-Clay visited UCSC, and gave an interesting talk about work that she’s been doing with Eugene Chiang on a model for the winds that flow off of hot Jupiters. Back in 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope was used to observe the HD 209458 b transit in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum surrounding the Lyman-alpha line. It turns out that the HD 209458 b transit has a depth of order 15% in Lyman alpha, indicating that a comet-like wind of hydrogen is flowing off the planet. Here’s a cartoon view:

The Murray-Clay and Chiang model assumes a steady-state flow, which allows them to adopt a time-independent treatment of the equations of hydrodynamics. It would be interesting to relax the time-independence and extend the analysis to the recently detected transits of HD 17156b. Because HD 17156b has such an eccentric orbit, any comet-like wind that it produces should be time-variable in nature. It should thus be possible to make some interesting predictions that can be tested when the community eventually regains the capability of observing transits in the ultraviolet.

“seventy six seven hundred”6
greg posted in exoplanet detection on October 20th, 2007

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The flurry of activity surrounding the detection of the HD 17156b transits, combined with the start of the academic quarter here at UCSC, caused me to fall way behind on my stack. All of a sudden, over two weeks have passed with no oklo.org posts. I think that’s a record, unfortunately.

And it’s not as if there’s been no new exoplanet news. The past two weeks have seen the announcement of two more new transiting planets from Gaspar Bakos’ HATnet project. “Yo, what up TrES?” HAT-P-5b has a period of 2.79 days, and looks good in a 400-pixel wide everything’s to scale diagram:

There are enough transiting extrasolar planets now, so that it’s interesting to look for trends in the planetary properties. At Jean Schneider’s exoplanet.eu site, there’s a nifty set of php routines that make it very easy to dial up all the different correlation diagrams. With the inclusion of HD 17156b, HAT-P-5b, and HAT-P-6b, a plot of planetary radii vs. stellar metallicity is pointing to an interesting trend. It’s quite apparent that the metal-rich stars tend to harbor smaller planets. This seems to be indicating that metal-rich disks are yielding planets that have highly enriched heavy element fractions, which in turn is giving us an important clue into the planet formation process.

If we ignore Gliese 436b, which is far smaller in both mass and radius than all the other known transiting exoplanets, then there’s a fairly obvious hint of two separate sequences in the diagram — a large-radius sequence, and a small-radius sequence. Feel free to voice your opinion in the comments section…

It’d certainly be nice to get more transits by planets orbiting bright parent stars. To that end, it’s important to stress that literally every single planet transiting a V<13 parent star is located north of the the celestial equator. It’s pretty clear that the southern hemisphere Doppler-wobble planets have not been fully followed up with photometric campaigns. I’m thus keen to get the Southern-Hemisphere Transitsearch.org corps out on the sky during the coming austral summer. First on the list is HD 76700b. This 0.20 Jupiter-mass planet orbits with a period of 3.970985 days, and has an extensive and fairly recent set of published radial velocities. I just updated the orbital fit, and found that the transit windows are still quite narrow. A simple bootstrap analysis shows that the uncertainty in the time of the transit midpoint is not much wider than the expected duration of the transit itself. The star is just coming visible in the early morning, and so it should be straightforward to either confirm or rule out a transit for this particular planet.

Confirmed!5
greg posted in exoplanet detection on October 4th, 2007

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I’m happy to report that HD 17156b is observable in transit, and that Transitsearch.org observers played the key role in the discovery.

Regular oklo.org readers are familiar with HD 17156 b. This planet has an orbital period of 21.2 days, which is nearly four times longer than any other known transiting planet, and an eccentricity of e=0.67 (even higher than HAT-P-2b’s eccentricity of e=0.5). The geometry of the eccentric orbit has a periastron angle of 121 degrees, which means that the planet is quite close to the star as it perforates the plane containing the line of sight to Earth. Here’s a scale model showing the planet (at equally spaced intervals), the star, and the orbit:

Early last week, I got e-mail from Mauro Barbieri, an Italian post-doctoral researcher who is working on the CoRoT satellite, and who’s based at LAM in Marseille, France. In his spare time, Mauro has been writing articles for popular astronomy magazines in Italy, and has worked to coordinate Italian amateur astronomers for participation in Transitsearch campaigns. On the night of Sept. 9/10, he recruited four Italian amateur astronomers to monitor the transit window.

Two observers in Northern Italy were clouded out prior to the start of the transit, but two others, D. Gasparri and C. Lopresti, were able to observe through much of the night in Central Italy. Their data looked promising, showing clear ingresses at the same time as the ingress was observed by Jose Almenara in the Canary Islands. Ron Bissinger, observing from Pleasanton, California, and seven hours farther west, was able to start observing just after the transit ended.

As it happened, Roi Alonso, another CoRoT postdoc, is good friends with Jose Almenara, who made the Canary Island observations on Sep 9/10. Barbieri and Alonso did a careful analysis of the three transit-bearing data sets, and concluded that the transit is present at 3-sigma, 5.3-sigma, and 7.9-sigma, respectively. Almenara’s data, in particular, is excellent, despite of the fact that high winds occluded part of the mid-transit time series. By last Friday, on the strength of the detections, we had begun drafting a paper that discusses the discovery.

The Almenara egress is particularly convincing (the bottom time series shows the result of subtracting out the best-fit transit signal):

Barbieri’s and Alonso’s fit to the data from Sep. 9/10 implies the following properties for the planet and the transit. The model consistently takes into account the eccentric character of the planetary orbit:

The fit to the data suggests that the radius of HD 17156b is just a bit larger than the radius of Jupiter. This is fully in line with our theoretical models of the planet. HD 17156b experiences strong tidal forces during its periastron passages. This tidal heating might be observable in the form of excess infrared radiation, but it is not serving to inflate the planet beyond its expected radius.

Needless to say, we were quite excited by the quality of the fit. Everything seemed to hang together quite well, but confirmation was essential. The full transit would be visible across the United States and Canada. I wrote to the transitsearch.org mailing list, urging observers to monitor the star through the night of Sep. 30/Oct. 1. Dave Charbonneau of Harvard had been following oklo.org, and was impressed by the Sep 9/10 data. He worked very hard to organize and coordinate observers, and he’ll be leading a follow-up paper that uses data from all the transits to improve the planetary and the orbital characterization. Dave was very generous in offering to notify us if a transit was confirmed by the cadre of observers that he’d recruited.

Sunday morning was perfectly clear in Santa Cruz. Ron Bissinger lives in Pleasanton, just forty miles to the Northeast, and was ready to observe. His pipeline is quite automated, and so if he could observe, I knew that we would rapidly rule out or confirm a transit.

Late Sunday afternoon, I went running, and noticed that a gloomy bank of clouds was visible over the Pacific to the west:

At dusk, it was still clear, but the weather forecast did not look good. The bands of clouds that had stayed offshore to the Northwest were beginning to slide across the skies. By midnight, it was evident that the Bay Area would not be producing useful photometry. Furthermore, all of Arizona and New Mexico were rained out. Observer after observer reported in to say that they had not gotten data. The only positive report of clear skies came from Dave, graduate student Philip Nutzman, and postdoc Jonathan Irwin, who had set up a small telescope on the roof of a Harvard/CfA building in Cambridge MA.

By Monday morning, however, it was clear that several observers had indeed managed to obtain data. In addition to the Harvard roof observations, Bill Welsh and Abhijith Rajan had obtained usable photometry from the Mt. Laguna Observatory run by San Diego State University. Dave reported to me that on Sunday, while Dave was visiting the Zoo with his daughter, Bill had called with the news that they had managed to secure a night on the telescope and were at that moment driving up the mountain. In addition, a report came from Tim Brown of Las Cumbres observatory that while their Hawaii site had been weathered out, observations had been successfully made from parking lot of the observatory headquarters in Santa Barbara. And in addition, Don Davies, a Transitsearch.org observer in Torrance California had obtained a 10,000 CCD frames under good sky conditions.

On Tuesday evening, I got a phone call from Dave. The transit was clearly visible in both the Cambridge and the Mt. Laguna data. Thirty minutes later, I got an e-mail from Don Davies, who, in the early stages of analysis was seeing a clear transit-like signal at the expected time. We signed on Davies as a co-author, added Dave’s personal communication to the paper draft, and submitted the discovery. The paper will be showing up on astro-ph today. Here’s a link to a .pdf version:

Barbieri et al. 2007, AA, submitted (157 kb)

As for HD 17156b itself, the transit should present a number of exciting opportunities for follow-up observations. The large orbit leads to a 26-fold orbital variation in the amount of flux received from the parent star. This should drive complex weather on the surface, and indeed, even the night side of the planet should be glowing from its own radiation. Here’s a frame from Jonathan Langton’s most recent simulation of the planet which shows the night side hemisphere:

And here’s a one-orbit 1 MB animation of the surface flow patterns, glowing and roiling with their own emitted heat.

Tonight’s the Night6
greg posted in exoplanet detection on September 30th, 2007

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Tonight, Sept. 30/Oct 1, is the night to follow-up to confirm whether HD 17156b can be observed in transit. Earlier this morning, I sent the following e-mail to the Transitsearch Observers list:

Hello Everyone,

I’d like to alert you to an important follow-up opportunity TONIGHT to observe HD 17156 for a possible transit by its companion planet. North American Observers are best situated for the event.

HD 17156 b has been the topic of several blog posts on oklo.org, see: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5].

Photometry taken by Jose Manuel Alemenara Villa on the Sept. 9/10 opportunity was suggestive of a possible transit with duration 169 minutes, a photometric depth of 0.007 magnitudes, and a mid-transit time of HJD ~ 2454353.614. These values are all quite close to what one would expect if HD 17156b is really transiting.

If the event observed by Alemenara Villa is due to a transit, then the next transit will be centered at HJD~2454374.83 (CE 2007 October 01 07:55 UT Monday) with the transit beginning at about 06:30 UT.

Observing should start as soon as possible this evening, and observers are encouraged to take photometry for as long as possible.

My fit to the published radial velocities predicts a transit midpoint centered at HJD 2454374.87 (CE 2007 Oct. 01 08:52 UT Monday), with a +/- 0.3d uncertainty in the time of central transit. The Alemenara Villa event sits nicely inside this window.

Thanks very much!
best regards,
Greg

It looks like much of the Southwest is clouded out, and although the skies outside here in Santa Cruz are currently cobalt blue, it’s predicted that clouds and even rain will materialize after midnight. SoCal, however, and many locations in the midwest and east look good to go. Here’s a selection of California predictions from the clear sky clock. This is a cool graphical tool for use in scheduling observations. Dark blue is good, white is bad.

Systemic in the Classroom1
greg posted in systemic faq on September 24th, 2007

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In our development of the systemic console and the systemic backend, we’ve strived to build a professional-quality tool that can be used by the general public. There’s no better way to get a sense of them planetary discovery process than to participate yourself, and so we’d like to encourage astronomy instructors to fold the systemic console into their curricula.

This link points to a Word format document of a sample homework assignment that makes use of both the console and the systemic backend. We’ve had good success with this particular problem set at UCSC, and it’s currently being implemented at MIT as well. The level has been found to be appropriate to an astrobiology class for science majors. There’s no math prerequisite, so it can also be fully useful for a non-major survey course.

If you’re an astronomy instructor and you’d like to incorporate hands-on planet finding into your course, let me know, and we can set up a fit submission aggregator for your students on the systemic backend.

Seeing in the Dark1
greg posted in non-technical posts on September 19th, 2007

This evening (Sept. 19th) the US Public Broadcasting Service is running a documentary on amateur astronomy which will include a section on extrasolar planets. The production is called Seeing in the Dark and it looks like it should be a very interesting and well done program.

Featured in the film are my friends and collaborators Ron Bissinger and Debra Fischer. Ron (whose day job is CEO of Alpha Innotech) has been a core member of Transitsearch.org from the beginning, and has consistently obtained great observations of transiting planets. Debra (an astronomy professor at SFSU) has, among her many accomplishments, discovered literally scores of extrasolar planets using the radial velocity technique. Both Ron and Debra’s work has been the focus of many past posts on this website.

So tonight, set your telescopes to acquire HD 185269, enable the robotic photometric observing mode, and sit down in front of the tube with a bowl of popcorn!

follow-up still in order…2
greg posted in exoplanet detection on September 18th, 2007

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In the last post, I pretty much wrote off HD 17156 b, which was the subject of last week’s transitsearch.org photometric follow-up campaign. Ron Bissinger observed the star during the latter part of the transit window, and saw no evidence of a transit. Tonny Vanmunster wrote with the news that Belgium was clouded out.

Soon after the post went up, however, Jose Manuel Almenara Villa of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias posted a comment:

Hi Greg,

I observed HD17156 in the transit window. Unfortunately the night was windy, affecting the small telescope so the photometry is not so clear as we would wish. Anybody else observe?

It’s possible that I have a central transit. I can show you some plots if you want. I will try to observe again on December 3 (I think that is my next opportunity).

Regards,
Jose

On Saturday, Jose sent me his photometric plots, I should point out that he emphasized once again that the night was windy. In his plots (I’ve rewritten the labels in illustrator so that they show up better on the narrow blog-page format) the black dots are individual observations (R filter, 7 s exposures), the red dots bin 6 observations, and the blue dots bin 12 observations.

On the night before the night of the transit window, he got baseline photometry which shows considerably less scatter, and which does a nice job of showing his excellent photometric technique:

He fit a simple trapezoidal transit template to his data. The resulting fit has a duration of 169 minutes, a depth of 0.007 magnitudes, and a mid-transit time (HJD) ~ 2454353.614. These values are all quite close to what one would expect if HD 17156 b really is transiting. The possible event ends just prior to the start of Ron Bissinger’s time series.

So what to think? It’s most important to reiterate Jose’s point that the weather was not particularly good, and that a block of critical data is missing during the event itself. I myself have contracted transit fever several times in the past, and have built up sufficient immunity to refrain from getting too excited. I think a conservatively realistic assessment would say that there’s still an 11% chance that HD 17156 b transits are occurring, and that the uncertainty in the window has been narrowed down significantly. Over the long run, if transitsearch.org is going to succeed, then its important to stay cautiously optimistic. The good thing about a transit is that it repeats with clockwork regularity (barring the unlikely, but tough-luck situation where dynamically induced precession of the node induces transit seasons.) The next chance to observe HD 17156 during the transit window falls to North America on Oct. 1, where hopefully there’ll be multiple observers on the sky. We’re bad - We’re Nationwide…

To end on a heartfelt note, I think that the global collaborative efforts that go into these transitsearch campaigns have been both fun and inspiring, even when the result is the high-probability flat-line light curve. It would be exciting, though, if Jose ends up leading a discovery paper with the other participating observers as co-authors.

Results4
greg posted in exoplanet detection on September 12th, 2007

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It’s not looking good for transits by HD 17156 b. Ron Bissinger of Pleasanton, California obtained a block of photometric data that covered a significant chunk of the transit window. His time series lasts from JD 2454353.68 through 2452353.88, and shows no hint of an event:

His observations were taken just after the peak of the transit midpoint histogram:

No word yet on whether anyone in Europe or the eastern US were able to observe during the first half of the window. If you got data, let me know.

Also, the Gliese 176 window has opened up. If you’ve got a telescope, a CCD, and a free evening, you know what to do!

Discover a planet3
greg posted in exoplanet detection, non-technical posts on September 11th, 2007

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My tight 30-minute layover in Denver turned into an eight-hour delay yesterday when a solenoid somewhere in our Boeing 777 malfunctioned just prior to pushback, giving me an unexpected opportunity to attempt to catch up on all the work that’s been piling up.

After 6 hours of tapping on the laptop, I’d exhausted my effectiveness, so I bought glossy magazines from the airport newstand. In the latest issue of Portfolio from Conde Nast, you can read an in-depth Vanity Fair style puff piece on ex-Tyco CFO Mark Swartz’s life in the Big House, and, in one of the advertisements, you’re encouraged to use a Visa “Signature” card to charge up some of the finer experiences in life. Quite to my surprise, #17 on a list that includes “See the Tony Awards live”, and “Test-drive a supercar”, is “Discover a planet”.

Now regular visitors to oklo.org all know that you can get your planet-discovery experience right here on the systemic backend without ever having to reach for your wallet. In fact, just yesterday, we learned from Gregory’s latest preprint on astro-ph that Eric Diaz (and a number of other systemic users) appear to have made the first characterizations of the most statistically probable planetary system fits to the HD 11964 radial velocity data set.

The HD 11964 data set was published by Butler et al. (2006). Two planets are already known to orbit this star. HD11964 b has roughly 1/3rd of a Saturn mass and a ~38-day orbit, whereas HD 11964 c is a sub-Jovian mass planet on a ~2110-day orbit. There’s a wide dynamically stable gap between the two planets, making this system a fertile hunting ground for additional companions.

Gregory does an extensive statistical analysis and argues that there’s strong evidence for a sub-Saturn mass planet on a year-long orbit. Eric Diaz’s version of this planet shows up in the fit that he submitted to systemic back in July 2007:

Eric also suggests the presence of a 12.4-day planet in the system. The Gregory analysis suggests that this planet is not statistically significant, but I’m going to add it to the transitsearch.org unpublished candidates list. There’s certainly no reason not to have a look-see if anyone has unused photometric capability.