1. EDEN Survey: Small Transiting Planet Detection Limits and Constraints on the Occurrence Rates for Late M Dwarfs within 15 pc
- Author
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Dietrich, Jeremy, Apai, Dániel, Schlecker, Martin, Hardegree-Ullman, Kevin K., Rackham, Benjamin V., Kurtovic, Nicolas, Molaverdikhani, Karan, Gabor, Paul, Henning, Thomas, Chen, Wen-Ping, Mancini, Luigi, Bixel, Alex, Gibbs, Aidan, Boyle, Richard P., Brown-Sevilla, Samantha, Burn, Remo, Delage, Timmy N., Flores-Rivera, Lizxandra, Franceschi, Riccardo, Pichierri, Gabriele, Savvidou, Sofia, Syed, Jonas, Bruni, Ivan, Ip, Wing-Huen, Ngeow, Chow-Choong, Tsai, An-Li, Lin, Chia-Lung, Hou, Wei-Jie, Hsiao, Hsiang-Yao, Lin, Chi-Sheng, Lin, Hung-Chin, and Basant, Ritvik
- Subjects
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) ,Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) ,Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics - Abstract
Earth-sized exoplanets that transit nearby, late spectral type red dwarfs will be prime targets for atmospheric characterization in the coming decade. Such systems, however, are difficult to find via wide-field transit surveys like Kepler or TESS. Consequently, the presence of such transiting planets is unexplored and the occurrence rates of short-period Earth-sized planets around late M dwarfs remain poorly constrained. Here, we present the deepest photometric monitoring campaign of 22 nearby late M dwarf stars, using data from over 500 nights on seven 1-2 meter class telescopes. Our survey includes all known single quiescent northern late M dwarfs within 15 pc. We use transit-injection-and-recovery tests to quantify the completeness of our survey, successfully identify most ($>80\%$) transiting short-period (0.5-1 d) super-Earths ($R > 1.9 R_\oplus$), and are sensitive ($\sim50\%$) to transiting Earth-sized planets ($1.0-1.2 R_\oplus$). Our high sensitivity to transits with a near-zero false positive rate demonstrates an efficient survey strategy. Our survey does not yield a transiting planet detection, yet it provides the most sensitive upper limits on transiting planets orbiting our target stars. Finally, we explore multiple hypotheses about the occurrence rates of short-period planets (from Earth-sized planets to giant planets) around late M dwarfs. We show, for example, that giant planets at short periods ($, 27 pages, 11 figures
- Published
- 2023