Paper: astro-ph/0509656
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 04:05:23 GMT (182kb)

Title: An analysis of the transit times of TrES-1b

Authors: Jason H. Steffen, Eric Agol (University of Washington)

Categories: astro-ph

Comments: 6 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS letters
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The presence of a second planet in a known, transiting-planet system will
cause the time between transits to vary. These variations can be used to
constrain the orbital elements and mass of the perturbing planet. We analyse
the set of transit times of the TrES-1 system given in Charbonneau et al.
(2005). We find no convincing evidence for a second planet in the TrES-1 system
from that data. By further analysis, we constrain the mass that a perturbing
planet could have as a function of the semi-major axis ratio of the two planets
and the eccentricity of the perturbing planet. Near low-order, mean-motion
resonances (within ~1% fractional deviation), we find that a secondary planet
must generally have a mass comparable to or less than the mass of the
Earth--showing that this data is the first to have sensitivity to sub
Earth-mass planets. We compare the sensitivity of this technique to the mass of
the perturbing planet with future, high-precision radial velocity measurements.

\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0509656 , 182kb)