118449365
LOW Mg/Si PLANETARY HOST STARS AND THEIR Mg-DEPLETED TERRESTRIAL PLANETS
Simulations have shown that a diverse range of extrasolar terrestrial planet bulk compositions are likely to exist based on the observed variations in host star elemental abundances. Based on recent studies, it is expected that a significant proportion of host stars may have Mg/Si ratios below 1. Here we examine this previously neglected group of systems. Planets simulated as forming within these systems are found to be Mg-depleted (compared to Earth), consisting of silicate species such as pyroxene and various feldspars. Planetary carbon abundances also vary in accordance with the host star C/O ratio. The predicted abundances are in keeping with observations of polluted white dwarfs, lending validity to this approach. Further studies are required to determine the full planetary impacts of the bulk compositions predicted here.
119158686
A survey of M stars in the field of view of Kepler space telescope
M dwarfs constitute more than 70% of the stars in the solar neighborhood. They are cooler and smaller than Sun-like stars and have less-massive disks which suggests that planets around these stars are more likely to be Neptune-size or smaller. The transit depths and transit times of planets around M stars are large and well-matched to the Kepler temporal resolution. As a result, M stars have been of particular interest for searching for planets in both radial velocity and transit photometry surveys. We have recently started a project on searching for possible planet-hosting M stars in the publicly available data from Kepler space telescope. We have used four criteria, namely, the magnitude, proper motion, H-Ks and J-H colors, and searched for M stars in Q0 and Q1 data sets. We have been able to find 108 M stars among which 54 had not been previously identified among Kepler's targets. We discuss the details of our selection process and present the results.
118658066
Stellar noise and planet detection. I. Oscillations, granulation and sun-like spots
Spectrographs like HARPS can now reach a sub-m/s precision in radial-velocity (RV) (Pepe & Lovis 2008). At this level of accuracy, we start to be confronted with stellar noise produced by 3 different physical phenomena: oscillations, granulation phenomena (granulation, meso- and super-granulation) and activity. On solar type stars, these 3 types of perturbation can induce m/s RV variation, but on different time scales: 3 to 15 minutes for oscillations, 15 minutes to 1.5 days for granulation phenomena and 10 to 50 days for activity. The high precision observational strategy used on HARPS, 1 measure per night of 15 minutes, on 10 consecutive days each month, is optimized, due to a long exposure time, to average out the noise coming from oscillations (Dumusque et al. 2010) but not to reduce the noise coming from granulation and activity. The smallest planets found with this strategy (Mayor et al. 2009) seems to be at the limit of the actual observational strategy and not at the limit of the instrumental precision. To be able to find Earth mass planets in the habitable zone of solar-type stars (200 days for a K0 dwarf), new observational strategies, averaging out simultaneously all type of stellar noise, are required.
119305169
SOPHIE velocimetry of Kepler transit candidates. I. Detection of the low-mass white dwarf KOI-74b
The Kepler mission has detected transits and occultations of a hot compact object around an early-type star, the Kepler Object of Interest KOI 74. The mass of this transiting object was photometrically assessed in a previous study using the presence of the relativistic beaming effect (so-called “Doppler boosting”) in the light curve. Our aim was to provide a spectroscopic validation of this pioneering approach. We measured the radial velocity variations of the A1V star KOI 74 with the SOPHIE spectrograph at the 1.93-m telescope of the Observatoire de Haute-Provence (France). Radial velocity measurements of this star are challenging because of the high level of stellar pulsations and the few available spectral lines. Using a technique dedicated to early-type main-sequence stars, we measured radial velocity variations compatible with a companion of mass 0.252 +/- 0.025 M(circle dot), in good agreement with the value derived from the Kepler light curve. This work strengthens the scenario suggesting that KOI 74 is a blue straggler orbited by a stellar core despoiled of its envelope, the low-mass white dwarf KOI 74b.
55401824
New analytical expressions of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect adapted to different observation techniques
The Rossiter-McLaughlin (hereafter RM) e ect is a key tool for measuring the projected spin-orbit angle between stellar spin axes and orbits of transiting planets. However, the measured radial velocity (RV) anomalies produced by this e ect are not intrinsic and depend on both instrumental resolution and data reduction routines. Using inappropriate formulas to model the RM e ect introduces biases, at least in the projected velocity V sini? compared to the spectroscopic value. Currently, only the iodine cell technique has been modeled, which corresponds to observations done by, e.g., the HIRES spectrograph of the Keck telescope. In this paper, we provide a simple expression of the RM e ect specially designed to model observations done by the Gaussian fit of a cross-correlation function (CCF) as in the routines performed by the HARPS team. We derived also a new analytical formulation of the RV anomaly associated to the iodine cell technique. For both formulas, we modeled the subplanet mean velocity vp and dispersion p accurately taking the rotational broadening on the subplanet profile into account. We compare our formulas adapted to the CCF technique with simulated data generated with the numerical software SOAP-T and find good agreement up to V sini? . 20 km.s 1 . In contrast, the analytical models simulating the two di erent observation techniques can disagree by about 10 in V sini? for large spin-orbit misalignments. It is thus important to apply the adapted model when fitting data.
8584850
Lithium abundances in exoplanet-host stars: modelling
Aims. Exoplanet host stars (EHS) are known to present superficial chemical abundances different from those of stars without any detected planet (NEHS). EHS are, on average, overmetallic compared to the Sun. The observations also show that, for cool stars, lithium is more depleted in EHS than in NEHS. The aim of this paper is to obtain constraints on possible models able to explain this difference, in the framework of overmetallic models compared to models with solar abundances. Methods. We have computed main sequence stellar models with various masses and metallicities. The results show different behaviour for the lithium destruction according to these parameters. We compare these results to the spectroscopic observations of lithium. Results. Our models show that the observed lithium differences between EHS and NEHS are not directly due to the overmetallicity of the EHS: some extra mixing is needed below the convective zones. We discuss possible explanations for the needed extra mixing, in particular an increase of the mixing efficiency associated with the development of shear instabilities below the convective zone, triggered by angular momentum transfer due to planetary migration.
14252204
Metadata services on the Grid
We present an interface for metadata access on the Grid, designed to support flexible schema management, efficient retrieval of large result sets and to allow a broad range of implementations. We also describe an implementation of this interface, which supports a wide range of storage back-ends and two access protocols: SOAP and a TCP-streaming-based protocol. This interface and implementation have been selected as the official metadata components of the gLite-EGEE middleware. Finally, we present the results of extensive performance studies, where the two front-ends are compared to evaluate the cost of using SOAP as metadata access protocol.