Research within the Max-Planck Minerva Group on Transiting Extrasolar Planets

The Pan-Planets Project : An ambitious search for transiting extrasolar planets led by Cristina Afonso (lead) and Thomas Henning (co-lead) (both fom MPIA) will be performed with the 1.8-m Pan-STARRS1 telescope and the largest camera in the world (7 square degrees), starting in 2008. The telescope is located at the Haleakala Observatory in Maui, Hawaii. The Pan-Planets project is a key project within the Pan-STARRS project, a consortium of several instiutions, namely the MPIA, the University of Hawaii, the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Harvard, John-Hopkins University, a United Kingdom Consortium of several partners, and the central University of Taiwan. Pan-Planets has an exceptional potential for a transit search of close-in Jupiter-like planets (<0.1 AU), since it combines a large field of view, a significant telescope size, with a fast read-out of the CCD camera (few seconds), and a quick slew of the telescope. These features allow the monitoring of several hundred thousand stars in only one field, and million of stars in two or more fields. Pan-Planets is expected to provide more than 100 Jupiter-like planets. These discoveries will be relevant for the statistical studies on planetary parameters and confrontation with population synthesis models. Theories of planet formation, migration and structure, require a large statistical sample, in the order of hundreds. The Pan-Planets results will be used as an input to these models.

The Wise-MPIA-Goettingen Survey : The Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg built a large Area Imager for the Wise Observatory- LAIWO, with a 1 squared degree field of view. The camera will be installed on the 1-m telescope during the month of October 2007, located at the Wise Observatory in Israel. A search for transiting planets will be performed, in a joint project of the MPIA, the University of Tel Aviv and the Institute for Astrophysics in Goettingen, Germany. The result of this survey will add to the statistics of transiting planets, for the study of planetary parameters.

The HAT-South  Survey : HAT-South is a project involving an network of an array of small-sized telescopes (18cm diameter) that will be scattered over three sites : Chile, Namibia and Australia, providing nearly a 24 hour coverage, substantially increasing the detection efficiency of extrasolar planets. The PI of the project is G. Bakos at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The MPIA is responsible for the Namibia node. This project is expected to start mid-2008 and has the potential of finding several planets around bright stars, the ideal targets for planetary atmospheric studies.

Atmospheric Studies of Extrasolar Planets : Atmospheric Studies of extrasolar planets around bright host stars are being undertaken with instrumentation at the VLT at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, such as SINFONI and CRIRES as well as with the IRTF in Hawaii. A variety of atmospheric models (Seager et al. 2005, Burrows et al. 2005, Barman et al. 2005, Fortney et al. 2006) have been proposed for estimating the properties of these hot Jupiters, establishing that the apparent planet equilibrium temperature is likely a strong function of wavelength and orbital phase. However, several atmospheric features remain unconstrained, such as the C/O ratio, the day-night temperature difference and weather. The potential lack of symmetry adds uncertainty to the already complex atmospheric modeling, introducing challenging issues, such as cloud coverage (if present), redistribution of absorbed stellar flux by winds, depth-dependent non-solar abundances, C/O ratio, photospheric temperatures and pressure gradients from day to night side. The models cited above, differ significantly in their predictions of observable day side and night side spectral shapes, due to the different treatment of these problems. The objective of the observational measurements is to discriminate the range of possibilities allowed by these models.