systemic

Image Source: APOD.

Last night, the alarm went off at 2:45 AM, just prior to the start of the full lunar eclipse. Remarkably, the fog had stayed away. The air was slightly warm, and the town was absolutely quiet. The shadow of the Earth was covering nearly the entire lunar surface, with just a small oblique portion of the lower right hemisphere still in sunlight. A few minutes later, the whole moon was glowing a dull orange-red against the easily visible stars of the ecliptic. It was creepy, weird. Definitely worth getting out of bed for.

The Sun and the Moon occupy nearly the same angular size in Earth’s sky. This means that to good approximation, the patch of sky covered by the moon during a central lunar eclipse contains stars that can see the Earth in transit across the face of the Sun.

And during a lunar eclipse, they see a double transit.

The famous “tooth” in the HST light curve for TrES-1 is generally attributed to the planet passing over starspots, but for those who prefer not to shave with Occam’s razor, it can be equally well modeled by a double transit.

Last night, during the eclipse, the Moon (at RA 22h 26 min, Dec= -09 deg 57 min) was only a few degrees away from the planet bearing stars GJ 876, GJ 849, HD 21707, and HD 219449.

Image Source.

Eugenio has finished combing through this summer’s literature, and has added twenty newly published radial velocity data sets to both the systemic backend and to the current version of the downloadable systemic console. As a result of his efforts, new or augmented data is now available for the following stars: Cha Ha 8, GJ 317, HD3651, HD5319, HD11506, HD17156, HD37605, HD43691, HD75898, HD80606, HD89744, HD125612, HD132406, HD170469, HD171028, HD231701, NGC2423, NGC4349, HAT-P-3, and TrES-4. As always, the published literature citations for the velocities are contained in the “vels_list.txt” file that comes bundled with the systemic console download. The vels_list.txt file can be indispensible if you want to publish results that use the systemic package as a research tool — indeed, we’re quite excited that researchers are starting to adopt the console in the course of carrying out state-of-the-art research (see, e.g. here.)

There’s quite a bit to explore with these new data sets. Eugenio has had a first look, and included in his recommendations are:

GJ 317: This system (discovered by John Johnson and the California-Carnegie planet search team, preprint here) is only the third red dwarf that’s been found to harbor a Jovian-mass companion. The data shows clear evidence for one planet “b”, with at least 1.2 Jupiter masses and a 693-day orbit, and there’s a strong hint of a second planet in the radial velocity variations. Check it out with the console!

HD 17156: This data comes from a recent paper by the California-Carnegie team. There are radial velocities from both the Keck and the Subaru telescopes, and the signal-to-noise of the orbit is very high.

The data show a ~3 Jupiter-mass planet on a 21.2 day orbit. The orbit is remarkably eccentric for a planet on such a short period, leading to a 25-fold variation in the amount of light received during each trip around the star.

It’ll be interesting to get a weather forecast for this world, and it’s also important to point out that the orientation of the orbit is very well suited for the possibility of observing transits. Periastron is reasonably close to being aligned with the line of sight to Earth, leading to an a-priori transit probability of more than 10%. In the discovery paper, a preliminary transit search is reported, but only about 1/4th of the transit window was ruled out. With a Dec of +71 degrees and a nice situation in the winter sky, this is definitely one for Transitesearch.org’s Finland contingent.

Image Source.

August 1st marked the most recent ’606 day, which came and went without wide remark. Perhaps this was because in late Summer, HD 80606 rises and sets in near-synch the Sun, and is thus lost from the Earth’s night skies.

At the moment, HD 80606b is headed back out toward apastron.

The global storms and shockwaves that were unleashed at the beginning of August are dissipating rapidly, and the flux of heat from the planet is likely fading back down to the sullen baseline glow that arises from tidal heating.

HD 80606′s next periastron passage occurs on November 20th, and the Spitzer Space Telescope is scheduled to observe the whole event (details here). It’s going to be a big deal. Spitzer can only observe HD 80606 during two three-week windows each year, and fortunately, the Nov. 20th Periastron passage occurs during one of these windows. It’s literally the only opportunity to catch HD 80606 b’s big swing before Spitzer’s cryogen runs out in 2009.

The orbital geometry of the periastron passage looks like this:

Each marker of the orbit is separated by one hour. The prediction for the pseudo-synchronous rotation of the planet is also indicated. The planet should be spinning with a period of 36.8 hours. Jonathan Langton’s hydrodynamics code predicts what the temperature distribution on the planet should look like at each moment from Spitzer’s viewpoint in our solar system:

Transitsearch.org observers have covered a number of the HD 80606 b transit opportunities, and it seems pretty certain that the planet doesn’t transit. This isn’t surprising. The geometry of the orbit is such that when the planet crosses the plane containing the line of sight to the Earth, it’s quite a distance away from the star. Not so, however, for the secondary transit. There’s a very respectable 15% chance that Spitzer will detect a secondary transit centered two hours prior to the periastron passage.

Even if the planet doesn’t transit, we should be able to get a good sense of the orbital inclination from the shape of the light curve. If the orbit is nearly in the plane of the sky, then we should see a steady rise followed by a plateau in the 8-micron flux coming from the planet. For more nearly edge-on configurations, the flux peak should be clearly discernable. The observations are scheduled to start 20 hours prior to periastron and end 10 hours after.

Vorticity can be thought of as the tendency of a paddlewheel to spin if placed in the flow. High vorticity is a large counter-clockwise spin, zero vorticity is no spin, and a large negative vorticity is a tendency to spin clockwise. Jonathan Langton’s climate models of short-period extrasolar planets show a remarkable variety of vorticity patterns on their surfaces, in keeping with the incredibly stormy and complex nature of their atmospheres. Here’s a gallery of Mercator-projection vorticity maps for the known strongly irradiated Jovian planets that have significant eccentricities. The red arrows indicate the wind speeds and directions across the planetary surfaces. These figures are all from a paper that’s currently under review at the Astrophysical Journal (see here for an overview of the numerical method that we’re using). Also, a shout-out is due to Edward Tufte for advocating the strong graphic-design effect of small spots of saturated color on a gray-scaled backdrop.

HAT-P-2b:

Here are 1.1 MB North Pole, South Pole and Mercator Projection animations of the HAT-P2b vorticity evolution.

HD 80606 b:

1.1 MB Mercator animation here.

HD 185269 b:

1.1 MB Mercator animation here.

HD 108147 b

1.1 MB Mercator animation here.

HD 118203 b:

1.1 MB Mercator animation here. The animations above are hosted on the Oklo Corporation’s servers.

It’s interesting to compare the vorticity maps with the temperature distributions on the planetary surfaces (shown in the same order as above):

Image Source.

The TrES survey announced the discovery of a new transiting planet today, raising the number of known transits to twenty (including Mercury and Venus). The new planet, “TrES-4″, has a mass of order 84% that of Jupiter, and with a radius of 1.67 Rjup, it’s pumped to nearly five times Jupiter’s volume:

The false color image of Jupiter was produced from near-infrared data obtained with the Gemini telescope. The even more luridly false-color representation of TrES-4 is based on a vorticity map from one of Jonathan Langton’s recent simulations.

In order for TrES-4 to be swollen to its current size, it needs to be experiencing heating of order 6×10^27 ergs per second. One way to do this is to have a significant perturbing companion which drives large time-averaged variations in TrES-4′s orbital eccentricity. So far, there are only four published radial velocities for TrES-4, so the orbit could easily be non-circular. More provocatively, if strong orbital forcing is indeed occurring, then there’s a reasonable chance that the perturber might also be observable in transit. I recommend that Transitsearch.org observers keep this bad boy under constant supervision.

Image Source.

HAT-P-2b. The name doesn’t exactly ring of grandeur, but this planet — a product of Gáspár Bakos’ HAT Net transit survey — is poised to give the Spitzer Space Telescope its most dramatic glimpse to date of a hot Jupiter.

HAT-P-2b’s orbit is remarkably eccentric for a planet with an orbital period of only 5.6 days, and by a stroke of luck, periastron is located almost exactly midway between the primary and the secondary transits (as viewed from Earth). The strength of the stellar insolation at periastron is nine times as strong as at apastron, which more than guarantees that the planet will have disaster-movie-ready weather.

On June 6th, Josh Winn and his collaborators used the Keck telescope to obtain 97 radial velocities for HAT-P-2. The observations were timed to occur before, during, and after primary transit, and the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect is clearly visible in their data (preprint here):

The symmetry of the Rossitered points indicates that the angular momentum vector of the planetary orbit is aligned with the spin pole of the star:

This state of affairs also holds true for the other transiting planets — HD 209458b, HD 149026b, HD 189733b — for which the effect has been measured. The observed alignments are evidence in favor of disk migration as the mechanism for producing hot Jupiters.

With its apparent magnitude of V=8.7, the HAT-P-2b parent star is roughly ten times brighter than the average planet-bearing star discovered in a wide-field transit survey. The star is bright enough, in fact, to have earned an entry in both the Henry Draper Catalog (HD 147506) and the Hipparcos Database (HIP 80076), but with its surface temperature of 6300K (F8 spectral type) it was too hot to have been a sure-fire “add” to the ongoing radial velocity surveys. Prior to this May, it had been entirely ignored in the astronomical literature (save a brief mention in this paper from 1969).

HAT-P-2′s intrisic brightness and its planet’s orbital geometry mean that in a relatively compact 34-hour observation, Spitzer can collect on the most interesting features of the orbit with high signal-to-noise. In particular, there is an excellent opportunity to measure the rate at which the day-side atmosphere heats up during the close approach to the star. The planet, in fact, presents such a remarkable situation that a block of Director’s Discretionary time was awarded so that the observations can be made during the current GO-4 cycle. They’ll be occurring soon.

Both HAT-P-2b and HD 80606 b will provide a crucial ground truth for extrasolar planetary climate simulations. Jonathan Langton’s current model, for example, predicts that that the temperatures on HAT-P-2b will range over more than 1000K. At the four times shown in the above orbital diagram, the hemisphere facing Earth is predicted to show the following appearances:

Spitzer, of course, can’t resolve the planetary disk. It measures the total amount of light coming from the planet in chosen passband. At 8-microns, the planet’s light curve should look like this:

The temperature maps only hint at the complex dynamics of the surface flow. A better indication is given by the distribution of vorticity,

which we’ll pick up in the next post…