Abstract
CoRoT was the first space mission dedicated to exoplanet detection. Operational between 2007 and 2012, this mission discovered 37 transiting planets, including CoRoT-7b, the first terrestrial exoplanet with a measured size. The precision of the published transit ephemeris of most of these planets has been limited by the relative short durations of the CoRoT pointings, which implied a danger that the transits will become unobservable within a few years due to the uncertainty of their future transit epochs. Ground-based follow-up observations of the majority of the CoRoT planets have been published in recent years. Between Dec. 2018 and Jan. 2021, the TESS mission in its sectors 6 and 33 re-observed those CoRoT fields that pointed towards the Galactic anti-center. These data permitted the identification of transits from nine of the CoRoT planets, and the derivation of precise new transit epochs. The main motivation of this study has been to derive precise new ephemerides of the CoRoT planets, in order to keep these planets’ transits observable for future generations of telescopes. The TESS data were analyzed for the presence of transits and the epochs of these re-observed transits were measured. The original CoRoT epochs, epochs from ground-based follow-up observations and those from TESS were collected. From these data, updated ephemerides are presented for nine transiting planets discovered by the CoRoT mission in its fields pointing towards the Galactic anti-center. In three cases (CoRoT-4b, 19b and 20b), transits that would have been lost for ground observations, due to the large uncertainty in the previous ephemeris, have been recovered. The updated ephemerides permit transit predictions with uncertainties of less than 30 min for observations at least until the year 2030. No significant transit timing variations were found in these systems.
Highlights
CoRoT was the first space mission dedicated to extrasolar planet detections (Baglin et al, 2006; Auvergne et al, 2009)
The present work is a continuation of D20, where we extend the ground-based observations with space-based timings for those planets for which suitable light-curves have been acquired by the TESS mission and present updated ephemeris
From ETD, whose timings are mostly sourced from amateur observers, we include those data that were found to be of sufficient reliability to be useful for the redetermination of the transit ephemeris reported in Sect
Summary
CoRoT was the first space mission dedicated to extrasolar planet detections (Baglin et al, 2006; Auvergne et al, 2009). Given the length of the CoRoT pointings, the precision of the planet’s ephemeris for the prediction of their future transit events is limited especially for planets found in the shorter pointings and/or for faint targets with low signal-to-noise ratio. The present work is a continuation of D20, where we extend the ground-based observations with space-based timings for those planets for which suitable light-curves have been acquired by the TESS mission and present updated ephemeris. The following work is exclusively describing results on CoRoT planets in the anti-center fields Another condition for inclusion in this work has been a successful identification of the planet’s transits in TESS short-cadence data, which provide a sampling of 120 s.
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