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Paper: High-Precision Doppler Follow-up of Planets Detected by COROT
Volume: 294, Scientific Frontiers in Research on Extrasolar Planets
Page: 71
Authors: Bouchy, F.; Mayor, M.; Pepe, F.; Queloz, D.; Udry, S.
Abstract: The planet-finding program of the COROT space mission is designed to search for planetary transits. On the assumption that the rate of planets orbiting these stars is a few percent, hundreds of giant planet transits and even a few terrestrial planets on short orbit transits are expected. The transit detection provides a measurement of the radius of the planet and of its orbital period if repeated transit events can be observed, but ground-based high-precision Doppler measurements are needed to provide the companion masses. This leads to a direct measurement of the planet mean density which provides useful constraints on the planetary internal equation-of-state and the planetary formation theories. The future high-precision echelle spectrograph HARPS, to be installed on the 3.6m ESO telescope (La Silla, Chile), will be fully adapted to characterize the mass, down to a few Earth masses, of a large number of planets detected by COROT, even on relatively faint stars.
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