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RE: paper on transits by extrasolar planets in OGLE data



Actually I tried to estimate these numbers last year and the results are in
Technical Note 74.
http://www.tass-survey.org/tass/technotes/tn0074.html
In that paper I came up with an estimate of 1 in 500 stars having an
eclipsing hot Jupiter.  This is close to the 1 in 1000 OGLE came up with
observationally.  The TN also goes into detail on how many transitions a
particular site may see during a year long program.

Thanks,

Mike G.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-tass@listserv.wwa.com [mailto:owner-tass@listserv.wwa.com]On
Behalf Of Stupendous Man
Sent: Saturday, March 23, 2002 2:09 PM
To: chrisalbertson90278@yahoo.com; tass@listserv.wwa.com
Subject: Re: paper on transits by extrasolar planets in OGLE data



  Chris asks:

> Here's a question:  If _every_ star had a Jupiter sized planet
> and the orbital planes were random with respect to our line of
> sight what fraction of the stars _could_ show a transit?

  Order-of-magnitude calculation: assume star of 1 solar radius,
planet of 0.1 solar radius (like Jupiter), planet's orbital radius
3 million km (equivalent to orbital period of 4 days, typical of
the "hot Jupiters").

     (scribble, scribble, scribble)

  Hmm.  I end up with a probability of around 7 percent that
such a planet will have the right orbital orientation to transit
its star, as seen from the Earth.

  You can find a proper calculation in papers by Borucki and collaborators;
for example, I see that in "The Vulcan Photometer: A Dedicated
Photometer for Extrasolar Planet Searches", PASP, 113, 782 (2001)

     http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?
           bibcode=2001PASP..113..439B&db_key=AST&high=3c321cbf8318006

a probability of about 10 percent is derived with similar assumptions.

  So, _if_ all stars have such planets, and _if_ the OGLE observational
selection effects were small (which is almost certainly wrong),
_then_ one might have expected OGLE to find 5000 transiting systems
out of 52,000 stars.

  Both of the "_if_" condition above aren't justified, of course.
There will be papers to come in which people use the OGLE results
to try to estimate the fraction of stars with such planets -- just
wait and see.

                                           Michael