The Use of Transit Timing to Detect Terrestrial-Mass Extrasolar Planets
Abstract
Future surveys for transiting extrasolar planets are expected to detect hundreds of jovian-mass planets and tens of terrestrial-mass planets. For many of these newly discovered planets, the intervals between successive transits will be measured with an accuracy of 0.1 to 100 minutes. We show that these timing measurements will allow for the detection of additional planets in the system (not necessarily transiting) by their gravitational interaction with the transiting planet. The transit-time variations depend on the mass of the additional planet, and in some cases terrestrial-mass planets will produce a measurable effect. In systems where two planets are seen to transit, the density of both planets can be determined without radial-velocity observations.
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This work was supported in part by NSF grant PHY99-07949 and by NASA grant NAG5-9678. This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and by the Canada Research Chair program. N.W.M. is a Canada Research Chair. We are grateful to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, where much of this investigation was carried out. We thank S. Gaudi and J. Winn for helpful discussions and careful reviews of the manuscript.
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Science
Volume 307 | Issue 5713
25 February 2005
25 February 2005
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American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Received: 23 November 2004
Accepted: 21 January 2005
Published in print: 25 February 2005
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