First Kepler Results - Secondary Transit of HAT-P-7

Press Conference

Schedule
August 6, Thursday
2 p.m. - Kepler Mission News Conference - HQ (Public and Media Channels)

Optimistic guess: they've found a hot Jupiter.

At least TrES-2 b. But yeah, the first Kepler-discovered planet would be nice.

Heh. Forgot about that one. Glad I said "found" not "discovered"...

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=28885

Quote :

Editor's's note: According to multiple sources, Kepler has not found anything "new". However it has successfully detected at least one previously discovered substellar object circling another star. In other words, this amazing little spacecraft works! In addition, new candidate exoplanets have also been discovered but await confirmation by other telescopes. The results of Kepler's observations will appear in an article in this week's edition of Science magazine.

Looking forward to Thursday's press conference 18:00 GMT... even with Kepler
telescope's larger field of view and better optics, 3 transits are
needed to confirm an exo-planet. Any idea if the mission uses RV
(Radial Velocity) follow-up by ground-based spectrographs to confirm detected exo-planets... It could speed up the science output?

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/news/L-14-press-conference.html

Phill wrote:

(Radial Velocity) follow-up by ground-based spectrographs to confirm detected exo-planets... It could speed up the science output?

Yes, RV follow-up is always used to measure the mass of transiting planet candidates. I know at least Keck devotes some time to Kepler candidates. Maybe HARPS-N?

Main news of the Press meeting was the confirmation of the capability to detect Earth-size planets and the fact that Kepler's detectors are working flawlessly...
Dr Alan Boss showed an interesting graph of the already 352 exo-planet detected with graph-axes; Earth masses versus Orbital distance...
Is this graph available online?

Phill wrote:

Is this graph available online?

Yeah, you can generate one at the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia.
http://www.exoplanet.eu/catalog-all.php?mdAff=diag#tc

Another news result from the conference: Detection and measurement of the HAT-P-7 b secondary transit, as well as detection of the phase curve of the planet, in optical wavelengths.

Edit:
Link to images used (HAT-P-7 b light curve, too)
http://kepler.nasa.gov/press/earlyresults.html

Interesting blog entry
http://beyondthecradle.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/622/
http://beyondthecradle.wordpress.com/2009/08/05/hat-p-7b-confirmation-and-many-great-things-to-come-with-natalie-batalha/

That is a truly awesome light curve.

The hubble light curves seem so limited and information sparse by contrast.

I'm disappointed that the sensitivity is only 40 parts per million considering an earth like planet causes a dip of only 80 part per million.

Hopefully as more transits are racked up, phase folding the curves can wring out more sensitivity from the instrument.

Wonder what the SNR is at present.

Its a shame that spectroscopic information is not being retrieved. It obvious now that the telescope is receiving a ton of extra info we may not be able to access.

The entire press conference is here on YouTube

Hi TheoA,

the light curve was obtained from just *10 days* of test observations as you can read in the press release:

"The find is based on a relatively short 10 days of test data collected before the official start of science operations. Kepler was launched March 6, 2009, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The observation demonstrates the extremely high precision of the measurements made by the telescope, even before its calibration and data analysis software were finished."

and the processing pipeline is not yet optimized. I fully aggree with you on one thing: it is an awesome lightcurve !

Cheers

Now, I can post something about a REAL Kepler result:

Secondary transit of HAT-P-7 b

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/325/5941/709

Listed amongst EPE's breaking news.

Not to try and be a nut case or anything, but did anyone notice that the HAT-P-7 b light curve that's circulating around is at least half fake?



Look at the position of the points before each primary transit. They're exactly the same

The most common publishings of the light curve that I've seen don't have the last 3rd of the graph (after 1.3 days), it looks like someone has stitched the first part of the graph onto the end, to make the periodicity seem clearer.

As long as the data points themselves are not 'made up' I don't think any representation or manipulation can be called 'fake' as long as clarifications are made.

It is very definitely a real effect you are seeing.

I wonder how many orbits are folded into that curve. Should be atleast four orbits worth of data if the full 10 days is included.

I've definitely seen before papers which have depicted repeat data to clearly show all points in the orbit. Folding to one period makes it less clear what's going on at the edges. Not too common a manipulation, but it has been done before.