TRANSITING EXTRA-SOLAR PLANETS WORKSHOP         25-28 September 2006         Max-Planck fuer Astronomie, Heidelberg, Germany

The search for extrasolar planets has established itself as a major research field in Astronomy  in the last decade and promises to be one of  the main science drivers for decades to come.

The radial velocity technique has been highly successful in  finding planets with more than a hundred detected up to the present. Recently this method entered the Earth  mass regime, with the discovery of several Neptune-mass planets, the majority in very close orbits below 0.1 AU.

Despite the enormous success of this technique, due to the degeneracy between the orbiting mass and the inclination angle, only a minimal mass mp*sin i for the planet can be determined.

Planetary transits yield many properties, namely mass and radius of the host star, along with the radius and inclination angle of the planet. The transit technique has come to fruition in recent years, with the detection of ten Jupiter-mass extrasolar transiting planets in close-in orbits (< 0.05 AU). The radius of  planets can only be determined from transiting planets, representing the principal motivation and strength of the transit technique. A radius measurement is an important quantity, since it allows to constrain the evolutionary and migration history of the planet and to infer its  composition and atmosphere through evolutionary models.

Over 20 ground-based experiments using the transit technique are being  undertaken world-wide. Several missions from space have been launched or are to be launched in the near future, such as MOST, Corot, and Kepler. Despite this large number of experiments hunting transits, presently only ten transiting extrasolar planets are known, all in the Jupiter mass domain: HD209458b (Mazeh et al. 2000), HD149026 (Sato et al. 2005) and HD189733b (Bouchy et al. 2005), detected originally with radial velocity. Five planets found by the OGLE group: OGLE-TR-56b (Konacki et al. 2003), OGLE-TR-113b and OGLE-TR-132b (Bouchy et al. 2004), OGLE-TR-111b (Pont et al. 2004) and OGLE-TR-10b (Bouchy et al. 2005, Konacki et al. 2005), and TrES-1, detected by the STARE telescope of the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (Alonso et al. 2004), and the XO planet (McCullough et al. 2006).

The workshop is intended to address several topics related to Transit Astronomy, in order to offer a global overview of the status of the field, regarding observational strategies, methods to select transits, as well as detections and characterization of planets. Moreover, the workshop intends to offer a discussion platform for new approaches, methodologies, and the issue of radial velocity follow-up observations for fainter host stars.