Tools for discovering and characterizing extrasolar planets

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of specialized software for high-precision photometric data reduction in wide-field surveys, crucial for discovering and characterizing transiting extrasolar planets, with applications demonstrated in the HATNet project.

Contribution

The paper introduces a comprehensive software package tailored for photometric reduction in large field-of-view surveys, enhancing the detection of transiting exoplanets.

Findings

Effective photometric reduction improves detection sensitivity.

Application to HATNet led to specific exoplanet discoveries.

Software addresses challenges of large-scale astronomical data processing.

Abstract

Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in the understanding of the evolution and formation of planetary systems: from the observations of photometric transits, the interior structure of the planet and atmospheric properties can also be constrained. The most efficient way to search for transiting extrasolar planets is based on wide-field surveys by hunting for short and shallow periodic dips in light curves covering quite long time intervals. These surveys monitor fields with several degrees in diameter and tens or hundreds of thousands of objects simultaneously. In the practice of astronomical observations, surveys of large field-of-view are rather new and therefore require special methods for photometric data reduction that have not been used before. In this PhD thesis, I summarize my efforts related to the development of a complete software solution for high precision photometric reduction of astronomical images. I also demonstrate the role of this newly developed package and the related algorithms in the case of particular discoveries of the HATNet project. [abridged]