The SuperWASP cameras are wide- field imaging systems at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, and at the Sutherland Station of the South African Astronomical Observatory. Each instrument has a field of view of some 482 deg(2) with an angular scale of 13".7 pixel(-1), and is capable of delivering photometry with accuracy better than 1% for objects having. V similar to 7.0 -11.5. Lower quality data for objects brighter than are stored in the project archive. The systems, while designed to monitor fields with high cadence, are capable of surveying the entire visible sky every 40 minutes. Depending on the observational strategy, the data rate can be up to 100 Gbytes per night. We have produced a robust, largely automatic reduction pipeline and advanced archive, which are used to serve the data products to the consortium members. The main science aim of these systems is to search for bright transiting exoplanet systems suitable for spectroscopic follow- up observations. The first 6 month season of SuperWASP-North observations produced light curves of similar to 6.7 million objects with 12.9 billion data points.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Aims. We report the discovery of very shallow (), periodic dips in the light curve of an active G9V star observed by the CoRoT satellite, which we interpret as caused by a transiting companion. We describe the 3-colour CoRoT data and complementary ground-based observations that support the planetary nature of the companion.Methods. We used CoRoT colours information, good angular resolution ground-based photometric observations in- and out- of transit, adaptive optics imaging, near-infrared spectroscopy, and preliminary results from radial velocity measurements, to test the diluted eclipsing binary scenarios. The parameters of the host star were derived from optical spectra, which were then combined with the CoRoT light curve to derive parameters of the companion.Results. We examined all conceivable cases of false positives carefully, and all the tests support the planetary hypothesis. Blends with separation >0.40´´or triple systems are almost excluded with a risk left. We conclude that, inasmuch we have been exhaustive, we have discovered a planetary companion, named CoRoT-7b, for which we derive a period of 0.853 day and a radius of R Earth. Analysis of preliminary radial velocity data yields an upper limit of 21 M Earth for the companion mass, supporting the finding.Conclusions. CoRoT-7b is very likely the first Super-Earth with a measured radius. This object illustrates what will probably become a common situation with missions such as Kepler, namely the need to establish the planetary origin of transits in the absence of a firm radial velocity detection and mass measurement. The composition of CoRoT-7b remains loosely constrained without a precise mass. A very high surface temperature on its irradiated face, ≈1800–2600 K at the substellar point, and a very low one, ≈50 K, on its dark face assuming no atmosphere, have been derived.

We report the detection of a transiting Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a relatively bright (V=11.79) K0V star. We detected the transit light-curve signature in the course of the TrES multi-site transiting planet survey, and confirmed the planetary nature of the companion via multicolor photometry and precise radial velocity measurements. We designate the planet TrES-1; its inferred mass is 0.75 +/- 0.07 Jupiter masses, its radius is 1.08 (+0.18/-0.04) Jupiter radii, and its orbital period is 3.030065 +/- 0.000008 days. This planet has an orbital period similar to that of HD 209458b, but about twice as long as those of the OGLE transiting planets. Its mass is indistinguishable from that of HD 209458b, but its radius is significantly smaller and fits the theoretical models without the need for an additional source of heat deep in the atmosphere, as has been invoked by some investigators for HD 209458b.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. To be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Ascii data in http://www.hao.ucar.edu/public/research/stare/data/TrES1.as

We report on an intensive observational campaign carried out with HARPS at the 3.6 m telescope at La Silla on the star CoRoT-7. Additional simultaneous photometric measurements carried out with the Euler Swiss telescope have demonstrated that the observed radial velocity variations are dominated by rotational modulation from cool spots on the stellar surface. Several approaches were used to extract the radial velocity signal of the planet(s) from the stellar activity signal. First, a simple pre-whitening procedure was employed to find and subsequently remove periodic signals from the complex frequency structure of the radial velocity data. The dominant frequency in the power spectrum was found at 23 days, which corresponds to the rotation period of CoRoT-7. The 0.8535 day period of CoRoT-7b planetary candidate was detected with an amplitude of 3.3 m s-1. Most other frequencies, some with amplitudes larger than the CoRoT-7b signal, are most likely associated with activity. A second approach used harmonic decomposition of the rotational period and up to the first three harmonics to filter out the activity signal from radial velocity variations caused by orbiting planets. After correcting the radial velocity data for activity, two periodic signals are detected: the CoRoT-7b transit period and a second one with a period of 3.69 days and an amplitude of 4 m s-1. This second signal was also found in the pre-whitening analysis. We attribute the second signal to a second, more remote planet CoRoT-7c . The orbital solution of both planets is compatible with circular orbits. The mass of CoRoT-7b is () and that of CoRoT-7c is (), assuming both planets are on coplanar orbits. We also investigated the false positive scenario of a blend by a faint stellar binary, and this may be rejected by the stability of the bisector on a nightly scale. According to their masses both planets belong to the super-Earth planet category. The average density of CoRoT-7b is , similar to the Earth. The CoRoT-7 planetary system provides us with the first insight into the physical nature of short period super-Earth planets recently detected by radial velocity surveys. These planets may be denser than Neptune and therefore likely made of rocks like the Earth, or a mix of water ice and rocks.

Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux of up to ∼20 per cent. The dipping activity can last for between 5 and 80 d. We characterize the object with high-resolution spectroscopy, spectral energy distribution fitting, radial velocity measurements, high-resolution imaging, and Fourier analyses of the Kepler light curve. We determine that KIC 8462852 is a typical main-sequence F3 V star that exhibits no significant IR excess, and has no very close interacting companions. In this paper, we describe various scenarios to explain the dipping events observed in the Kepler light curve. We confirm that the dipping signals in the data are not caused by any instrumental or data processing artefact, and thus are astrophysical in origin. We construct scenario-independent constraints on the size and location of a body in the system that are needed to reproduce the observations. We deliberate over several assorted stellar and circumstellar astrophysical scenarios, most of which have problems explaining the data in hand. By considering the observational constraints on dust clumps in orbit around a normal main-sequence star, we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet or planetesimal fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous break-up event, possibly caused by tidal disruption or thermal processing. The minimum total mass associated with these fragments likely exceeds 10⁻⁶ M_⊕, corresponding to an original rocky body of >100 km in diameter. We discuss the necessity of future observations to help interpret the system.