TASTE: The Asiago Survey for Timing transit variations of Exoplanets

TL;DR

TASTE is a survey using high-precision photometry to detect transit timing variations in exoplanets, aiming to find additional bodies like moons or planets through transit analysis.

Contribution

The project demonstrates improved timing accuracy and refines orbital parameters for exoplanets using short-cadence light curves from the Asiago telescope.

Findings

Achieved timing accuracy of 11 and 25 seconds for two exoplanets.

Refined ephemerides for HAT-P-3b and HAT-P-14b.

Showed the method's competitiveness in detecting transit variations.

Abstract

A promising method to detect earth-sized exoplanets is the timing analysis of a known transit. The technique allows a search for variations in transit duration or center induced by the perturbation of a third body, e.g. a second planet or an exomoon. To this aim, TASTE (The Asiago Survey for Timing transit variations of Exoplanets) project will collect high-precision, short-cadence light curves for a selected sample of transits by using imaging differential photometry at the Asiago 1.82m telescope. The first light curves show that our project can already provide a competitive timing accuracy, as well as a significant improvement over the orbital parameters. We derived refined ephemerides for HAT-P-3b and HAT-P-14b with only one transit each, thanks to a timing accuracy of 11 and 25 s, respectively.