AAS 197, January 2001
Session 62. Detecting and Characterizing Extrasolar Planets
Oral, Tuesday, January 9, 2001, 1:30-3:00pm, Golden Ballroom

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[62.05] Ground-Based Detection of Terrestrial-Sized Extrasolar Planets Around Small Eclipsing Binary Systems

L.R. Doyle (SETI Institute), H.J. Deeg (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia), J.M. Jenkins (SETI Institute)

We have photometrically searched the circumstellar habitable zone (about 95% coverage) for planets around the M4 eclipsing binary system CM Draconis for evidence of planetary transits. With 1014 hours of imaging data we have reached a detection limit of about 2.3 Earth radii (less than 1% the volume of Jupiter) for planets with periods of 60 days or less, marginally demonstrating that the ground-based detection of large terrestrial-class planets around small main-sequence stars is possible using 1-meter-sized telescopes. We have also found that precise timing of the stellar eclipses themselves is capable of detecting non-coplanar jovian- mass planets with semi-major axes of 1 AU or greater. Two 2.5- Earth-radii terrestrial-sized transit candidate planets remain after applying a matching-correlation filter comparing over 400 million quasi-periodic transit models with the differential light curve. Also, one outer jovian-mass candidate is indicated in the power spectrum of the O-C residuals from about four dozen precise eclipse timings over 6 years. We will discuss our recent extension of these methods to crowded stellar fields where hundreds of eclipsing binary systems may be searched at the same time.


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