Blue Dots Team Transits Working Group Review

TL;DR

This review discusses the advancements and future prospects of the transit method in exoplanet detection and characterization, highlighting recent successes, ongoing projects, and the potential for discovering Earth-like planets in habitable zones.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current transit surveys, follow-up studies, and how these efforts align with the Blue Dots initiative for exoplanet research.

Findings

Over 60 transiting exoplanets known to date

Successful multi-wavelength follow-up with HST and Spitzer

Next-generation missions like CoRoT and Kepler are expanding detection capabilities.

Abstract

Transiting planet systems offer an unique opportunity to observationally constrain proposed models of the interiors (radius, composition) and atmospheres (chemistry, dynamics) of extrasolar planets. The spectacular successes of ground-based transit surveys (more than 60 transiting systems known to-date) and the host of multi-wavelength, spectro-photometric follow-up studies, carried out in particular by HST and Spitzer, have paved the way to the next generation of transit search projects, which are currently ongoing (CoRoT, Kepler), or planned. The possibility of detecting and characterizing transiting Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of their parent stars appears tantalizingly close. In this contribution we briefly review the power of the transit technique for characterization of extrasolar planets, summarize the state of the art of both ground-based and space-borne transit search programs, and illustrate how the science of planetary transits fits within the Blue Dots perspective.