DECPHOT: an optimal deconvolution-based photometric reduction method

By observing the transits of exoplanets, one may determine many fundamental system parameters. I review current techniques and results for the parameters that can be measured with the greatest precision, specifically, the transit times, the planetary mass and radius, and the projected spin-orbit angle.

The first transiting extrasolar planet, orbiting HD209458, was a Doppler wobble planet before its transits were discovered with a 10 cm CCD camera. Wide-angle CCD cameras, by monitoring in parallel the light curves of tens of thousands of stars, should find hot Jupiter transits much faster than the Doppler wobble method. The discovery rate could easily rise by a factor 10. The sky holds perhaps 1000 hot Jupiters transiting stars brighter than V=13. These are bright enough for...

Photometric observations of exoplanet transits can be used to derive the orbital and physical parameters of an exoplanet. We analyzed several transit light curves of exoplanets that are suitable for ground-based observations whose complete information is available on the Exoplanet Transit Database (ETD). We analyzed transit data of planets including HAT-P-8 b, HAT-P-16 b, HAT-P-21 b, HAT-P-22 b, HAT-P-28 b and HAT-P-30 b using the AstroImageJ (AIJ) software package. In this p...

Strong variations of any kind and causes within a stellar light curve may prohibit the detection of transits, particularly of faint or shallow transits caused by small planets passing in front of the stellar disk. The success of future space telescopes with the goal for finding small planets will be based on proper filtering, analysis and detection of transits in perturbed stellar light curves. The wavelet-based filter methods VARLET and PHALET, developed by RIU-PF, in combin...

Gaussian processes (GPs) are commonly used as a model of stochastic variability in astrophysical time series. In particular, GPs are frequently employed to account for correlated stellar variability in planetary transit light curves. The efficient application of GPs to light curves containing thousands to tens of thousands of datapoints has been made possible by recent advances in GP methods, including the celerite method. Here we present an extension of the celerite method t...

Direct imaging of exoplanets is limited by bright quasi-static speckles in the point spread function (PSF) of the central star. This limitation can be reduced by subtraction of reference PSF images. We have developed an algorithm to construct an optimized reference PSF image from a set of reference images. This image is built as a linear combination of the reference images available and the coefficients of the combination are optimized inside multiple subsections of the image...

Due to the exquisite photometric precision, transiting exoplanet discoveries from the Kepler mission are enabling several new techniques of confirmation and characterization. One of these newly accessible techniques analyzes the phase variations of planets as they orbit their stars. The predicted phase variation for multi-planet systems can become rapidly complicated and depends upon the period, radius, and albedo distributions for planets in the system. Here we describe the ...

NASA's Kepler, K2 and TESS missions employ Simple Aperture Photometry (SAP) to derive time-series photometry, where an aperture is estimated for each star, and pixels containing each star are summed to create a single light curve. This method is simple, but in crowded fields the derived time-series can be highly contaminated. The alternate method of fitting a Point Spread Function (PSF) to the data is able to account for crowding, but is computationally expensive. In this pap...

PlanetPack, initially released in 2013, is a command-line software aimed to facilitate exoplanets detection, characterization, and basic dynamical $N$-body simulations. This paper presents the third major release of PlanetPack that incorporates multiple improvements in comparison to the legacy versions. The major ones include: (i) modelling noise by Gaussian processes that in addition to the classic white noise may optionally include multiple components of the red noise, mo...

Transit photometry is perhaps the most successful method for detecting exoplanets to date. However, a substantial amount of signal processing is needed since the dip in the signal detected, an indication that there is a planet in transit, is minuscule compared to the overall background signal due mainly to its host star. In this paper, we put forth a doable and straightforward method to enhance the signal and reduce noise. We discuss how to achieve higher planetary signals by...