Abstract
ABSTRACT We observed a transit of WASP-166 b using nine Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) telescopes simultaneously with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) observations of the same transit. We achieved a photometric precision of 152 ppm per 30 min with the nine NGTS telescopes combined, matching the precision reached by TESS for the transit event around this bright (T = 8.87) star. The individual NGTS light-curve noise is found to be dominated by scintillation noise and appears free from any time-correlated noise or any correlation between telescope systems. We fit the NGTS data for TC and Rp/R*. We find TC to be consistent to within 0.25σ of the result from the TESS data, and the difference between the TESS and NGTS measured Rp/R* values is 0.9σ. This experiment shows that multitelescope NGTS photometry can match the precision of TESS for bright stars, and will be a valuable tool in refining the radii and ephemerides for bright TESS candidates and planets. The transit timing achieved will also enable NGTS to measure significant transit timing variations in multiplanet systems.
Highlights
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS; Ricker et al 2015) has been hunting for exoplanets transiting bright stars since July 2018
Scintillation behaves as white noise on the time-scales of exoplanet transits (Fohring et al 2019), and the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) light curves in this study confirm so we expect lower photometric precision than we achieved for WASP-166
Our data have shown that the noise in NGTS bright star light curves is dominated by scintillation noise
Summary
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS; Ricker et al 2015) has been hunting for exoplanets transiting bright stars since July 2018. The Generation Transit Survey (NGTS; Wheatley et al 2018) is an exoplanet hunting facility situated at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile It consists of 12 robotic telescopes, each with a 20 cm diameter and a field of view of 8 deg. We mitigate this limitation with NGTS by observing a target star simultaneously with multiple telescopes This increases the effective collecting area of the facility, allowing us to obtain a light curve equivalent to a larger aperture telescope while preserving the wide field of view. We present a study into the photometric precision and noise properties of the NGTS multitelescope observations for a bright star hosting a transiting planet.
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