1. A Candidate Transit Event around Proxima Centauri
- Author
-
Gudmundur Stefansson, Caleb I. Cañas, Paul Robertson, Andrew J. Monson, Yiting Li, and Suvrath Mahadevan
- Subjects
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) ,Physics ,010308 nuclear & particles physics ,Event (relativity) ,FOS: Physical sciences ,Astronomy ,General Medicine ,Radius ,01 natural sciences ,Exoplanet ,law.invention ,Telescope ,Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics ,13. Climate action ,Observatory ,law ,Planet ,0103 physical sciences ,Astrophysics::Solar and Stellar Astrophysics ,Astrophysics::Earth and Planetary Astrophysics ,Transit (astronomy) ,010303 astronomy & astrophysics ,Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) ,Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics - Abstract
We present a single candidate transit event around Proxima Centauri, found during a blind transit search using a robotic 30\,cm telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. The event lasted 1 hour, with an estimated depth of 5\,mmag, and is inconsistent with the transit window predicted for the recently discovered planet b. We modeled the lightcurve under the assumption that the event was caused by a transiting exoplanet, and our model predicts the planet has a radius $R \sim 1 R_{\oplus}$. We encourage continued monitoring of Proxima to elucidate the origin of this event., Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for publication in Research Notes of the AAS
- Published
- 2017
- Full Text
- View/download PDF