Bibcode
Colón, K. D.; Deeg, H. J.; Ford, E. B.; Redfield, S.; Fortney, J. J.; Shabram, M.; Mahadevan, S.
Bibliographical reference
Fourth Science Meeting with the GTC (Eds. C. Muñoz-Tuñón & J. M. Rodríguez-Espinosa) Revista Mexicana de Astronomía y Astrofísica (Serie de Conferencias) Vol. 42, pp. 1-2 (2013) (http://www.astroscu.unam.mx/~rmaa/)
Advertised on:
5
2013
Citations
1
Refereed citations
1
Description
We report observations of the exoplanet host-star HD 80606 using the
OSIRIS tunable filter imager. Very-high-precision, narrow-band
photometry in four bandpasses around the K I absorption feature was
acquired during the January 2010 transit of HD 80606b, with further
off-transit observations taken January and April of 2010. We obtained
differential photometric precisions of ~2.08×10^-4 for the
in-transit flux ratio measured at 769.91 nm, which probes the K I line
core. The observed changes in the depth of the transit across several
wavelengths is equivalent to a ~4.2% change in the apparent planetary
radius with wavelength, which is much larger than the atmospheric scale
height. This implies the observations probed the atmosphere at very low
pressures as well as a dramatic change in the pressure at which the
optical depth reaches unity across the bands observed. We hypothesize
that the excess absorption may be due to K I in a high-speed wind being
driven from the exoplanet's exosphere and discuss the viability of this
and alternative interpretations. We also present similar observations of
the exoplanet XO-2b that were acquired recently and which are currently
being analysed. Finally, we discuss future prospects for exoplanet
characterization using tunable filter spectrophotometry.