| |
 |
| Paper: |
Looking for Transits of Jupiter-Size Planets Orbiting Stars in Habitable Zones |
| Volume: |
430, Pathways Towards Habitable Planets |
| Page: |
439 |
| Authors: |
García-Melendo, E.; Ribas, I. |
| Abstract: |
Owing to detection bias, most of the nearly 400 discovered planets thus far are Jupiter-mass bodies. According to the extreme Venus and Mars criteria for the limits of the habitable zone (HZ) around stars with detected exoplanets (Selsis et al. 2007), a few of these Jupiter-size worlds orbit completely inside their parent star’s HZ. These planets have orbital semi-major axes between 1 and 4 AU and orbital periods around one year or longer. The discovery of a transiting “warm" Jupiter will provide valuable information on its atmosphere, as well as offer the possibility of detecting Earth and super-Earth type satellites (potentially habitable) by using a variety of techniques such as ultra-high precision photometry or long-term transit timings. An evaluation of the transit probability will depend on a careful study of available and new photometric and spectroscopic data to characterize the host stars and to determine improved ephemeris of the planet-star conjunction time. Transit events, with a duration between seven and ten hours, and photometric depths in excess of 1%, might be easily detected from two or three independent ground-based telescopes as shown recently during the discovery of the optical transit of HD80606b. |
|
|
|
|
|
