Homogeneous studies of transiting extrasolar planets - I. Light-curve analyses

I present a homogeneous analysis of the transit light curves of 14 well-observed transiting extrasolar planets. The light curves are modelled using JKTEBOP, random errors are measured using Monte Carlo simulations and the effects of correlated noise are included using a residual-permutation algorithm. The importance of stellar limb darkening on the light-curve solutions and parameter uncertainties is investigated using five different limb darkening laws and including different numbers of coefficients as fitted parameters. The linear limb darkening law cannot adequately fit the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) photometry of HD 209458, but the other four laws give very similar results to each other for all transit light curves. In most cases fixing the limb darkening coefficients at theoretically predicted values does not bias the results, but does cause the error estimates to be too small. The available theoretical limb darkening coefficients clearly disagree with empirical values measured from the HST light curves of HD 209458; limb darkening must be included as fitted parameters when analysing high-quality light curves.