A new look at the Spitzer primary transit observations of the exoplanet HD189733b
Abstract
New blind source separation techniques are used to analyse uniformly eight primary transit lightcurves of the exoplanet HD189733b recorded with the infrared camera IRAC on board the Spitzer Space Telescope at 3.6μm. The observations were performed between 2006 and 2011: two of them were obtained in the"Cold Spitzer" regime, the others were taken in the "Warm Spitzer" period. The techniques we used to process the data are based on an Independent Component Analysis (ICA) approach, i.e. a computational method to disentangle the 'original source signals' from a set of observations/ recordings in which they are mixed. ICA assumes only the mutual statistical independence and the non-gaussianity of the source signals. Our objective was to extract the transit components by removing instrumental systematic effects and possibly other sources of astrophysical noise, such as background and stellar activity. The novelty of the algorithms used is their ability to extract the exoplanet signal in a single observation. In this presentation we will present the results obtained, detail the methods adopted and critically discuss the conclusions of our work by comparing said results to the ones obtained in the literature.
- Publication:
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European Planetary Science Congress
- Pub Date:
- September 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013EPSC....8..997M