Transit-period search from single-event space-based data: the role of wide-field surveys

Abstract

We investigate the optimization of dataset weighting in searching for the orbital period of transiting planets when high-precision space-based data with a single transit event are combined with (relatively) low-precision ground-based (wide-field) data. The optimization stems from the lack of multiple events in the high-precision data and the likely presence of such events in the low-precision data. With noise minimization, we combined two types of frequency spectra: (i) spectra that use two fixed transit parameters (moment of the center of the transit and duration of the event) derived from the space data alone; (ii) spectra that result from the traditional weighted box signal search with optimized transit parameters for each trial period. We used many mock signals to test the detection power of the method. Marginal or no detections in the ground-based data may lead to secure detections in the combined data with the above weighting. Depending on the coverage and quality of the ground-based data, transit depths of ~0.05% and periods up to ~100 days are accessible by the suggested optimum combination of the data.