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Photometric monitoring of Beta Pictoris in 1981 showed anomalous fluctuations of up to 4% over several days, consistent with foreground material transiting the stellar disk. The subsequent discovery of the gas giant planet Beta Pictoris b and the predicted transit of its Hill sphere to within 0.1 au projected distance of the planet provided an opportunity to search for the transit of a circumplanetary disk in this $21\pm 4$ Myr-old planetary system. Continuous broadband photometric monitoring of Beta Pictoris requires ground-based observatories at multiple longitudes to provide redundancy and to provide triggers for rapid spectroscopic followup. These observatories include the dedicated Beta Pictoris monitoring observatory bRing at Sutherland and Siding Springs, the ASTEP400 telescope at Concordia, and observations from the space observatories BRITE and Hubble Space Telescope. We search the combined light curves for evidence of short period transient events caused by rings and for longer term photometric variability due to diffuse circumplanetary material. We find no photometric event that matches with the event seen in November 1981, and there is no systematic photometric dimming of the star as a function of the Hill sphere radius. We conclude that the 1981 event was not caused by the transit of a circumplanetary disk around Beta Pictoris b. The upper limit on the long term variability of Beta Pictoris places an upper limit of $1.8\times 10^{22}$ g of dust within the Hill sphere. Circumplanetary material is either condensed into a non-transiting disk, is condensed into a disk with moons that has a small obliquity, or is below our detection threshold. This is the first time that a dedicated international campaign has mapped the Hill sphere transit of a gas giant extrasolar planet at 10 au., 12 pages, 9 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in A&A. Reduced data and reduction scripts on GitHub at https://github.com/mkenworthy/beta_pic_b_hill_sphere_transit

A detailed knowledge of stellar activity is crucial for understanding stellar dynamos, as well as pushing exoplanet radial-velocity detection limits towards Earth analogue confirmation. We directly compare archival HARPS spectra taken at the minimum in $��$ Cen B's activity cycle to a high-activity state when clear rotational modulation of $\log{R'_{HK}}$ is visible. Relative to the inactive spectra, we find a large number of narrow pseudo-emission features in the active spectra with strengths that are rotationally modulated. These features most likely originate from plage, spots, or a combination of both. They also display radial velocity variations of $\sim$300 m s$^{-1}$ - consistent with an active region rotating across the stellar surface. Furthermore, we see evidence that some of the lines originating from the `active immaculate' photosphere appear broader relative to the `inactive immaculate' case. This may be due to enhanced contributions of e.g. magnetic bright points to these lines, which then causes additional line broadening. More detailed analysis may enable measurements of plage and spot coverage using single spectra in the future., 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) Letters

Context: Secondary eclipse measurements of transiting extrasolar planets with the Spitzer Space Telescope have yielded several direct detections of thermal exoplanet light. Since Spitzer operates at wavelengths longward of 3.6 um, arguably one of the most interesting parts of the planet spectrum (from 1 to 3 um) is inaccessible with this satellite. This region is at the peak of the planet's spectral energy distribution and is also the regime where molecular absorption bands can significantly influence the measured emission. Aims: So far, 2.2 um K-band secondary eclipse measurements, which are possible from the ground, have not yet lead to secure detections. The aim of this paper is to measure the secondary eclipse of the very hot Jupiter TrES-3b in K-band, and in addition to observe its transit, to obtain an accurate planet radius in the near infrared. Methods: We have used the William Herschell Telescope (WHT) to observe the secondary eclipse, and the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) to observe the transit of TrES-3b. Both observations involved significant defocusing of the telescope, aimed to produce high-cadence time series of several thousand frames at high efficiency, with the starlight spread out over many pixels. Results: We detect the secondary eclipse of TrES-3b with a depth of -0.241+-0.043% (~6 sigma). This corresponds to a day-side brightness temperature of T_B(2.2um)= 2040+-185 K, which is consistent with current models of the physical properties of this planet's upper atmosphere. The centre of the eclipse seems slightly offset from phase phi=0.5 by Delta_phi=-0.0042+-0.0027, which could indicate that the orbit of TrES-3b is non-circular [abridged]., LaTeX 4 pages: Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters 493, pp. L31-L34. See press release on http://outreach.jach.hawaii.edu/pressroom/2009_planet_TrES3b/

Stellar activity is the major roadblock on the path to finding true Earth-analogue planets with the Doppler technique. Thus, identifying new indicators that better trace magnetic activity (i.e. faculae and spots) is crucial to aid in disentangling these signals from that of a planet’s Doppler wobble. In this work, we investigate activity related features as seen in disc-integrated spectra from the HARPS-N solar telescope. We divide high-activity spectral echelle orders by low-activity master templates (as defined using both $\log {R^{\prime }_{HK}}$ and images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO), creating ‘relative spectra’. With resolved images of the surface of the Sun (via SDO), the faculae and spot filling factors can be calculated, giving a measure of activity independent of, and in addition to, $\log {R^{\prime }_{HK}}$. We find pseudo-emission (and pseudo-absorption) features in the relative spectra that are similar to those reported in our previous work on α Cen B. In α Cen B, the features are shown to correlate better to changes in faculae filling factor than spot filling factor. In this work, we more confidently identify changes in faculae coverage of the visible hemisphere of the Sun as the source of features produced in the relative spectra. Finally, we produce trailed spectra to observe the radial velocity component of the features, which show that the features move in a redward direction as one would expect when tracking active regions rotating on the surface of a star.

Long-term stellar activity variations can affect the detectability of long-period and Earth-analogue extrasolar planets. We have, for 54 stars, analysed the long-term trend of five activity indicators: log$R'_\mathrm{{HK}}$, the cross-correlation function (CCF) bisector span, CCF full-width-at-half-maximum, CCF contrast, and the area of the Gaussian fit to the CCF; and studied their correlation with the RVs. The sign of the correlations appears to vary as a function of stellar spectral type, and the transition in sign signals a noteworthy change in the stellar activity properties where earlier type stars appear more plage dominated. These transitions become more clearly defined when considered as a function of the convective zone depth. Therefore, it is the convective zone depth (which can be altered by stellar metallicity) that appears to be the underlying fundamental parameter driving the observed activity correlations. In addition, for most of the stars, we find that the RVs become increasingly red-shifted as activity levels increase, which can be explained by the increase in the suppression of convective blue-shift. However, we also find a minority of stars where the RVs become increasingly blue-shifted as activity levels increase. Finally, using the correlation found between activity indicators and RVs, we removed RV signals generated by long-term changes in stellar activity. We find that performing simple cleaning of such long-term signals enables improved planet detection at longer orbital periods.