π Earth: a 3.14-day Earth-sized Planet from K2's Kitchen Served Warm: Observation

Table of Links

Abstract & Introduction

Observation

Analysis and Validation

Future Prospects & References

2. OBSERVATIONS

2.1. A Candidate in Archival K2 Data

EPIC 249631677 was observed by K2 in Campaign 15 from 2017-08-23 22:18:11 UTC to 2017-11-19 22:58:27 UTC continuously for about 90 days as part of program GO 15005 (PI: I. Crossfield). The pointing was maintained by using two functioning reaction wheels, while the telescope drifted slowly in the third axis due to radiation pressure from the Sun, which was corrected periodically by thruster firing (Howell et al. 2014). As a consequence of such a modus operandi, uncorrected K2 light curves can show saw-tooth structures.

Many pipelines have been built to correct for such systematics. Two popular detrending algorithms for K2 light curves are K2SFF (Vanderburg & Johnson 2014) and everest (Luger et al. 2016). These pipelines have helped to achieve precision comparable to that of Kepler by correcting for systematics caused by intrapixel and inter-pixel variations. In the case of EPIC 249631677b, the standard deviation of the flattened light curve for K2SFF was observed to be 1230 ppm, compared to 685 ppm for everest. Considering this, we use the light curve from the everest pipeline, available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes, throughout this analysis. We use a biweight filter with a window of 0.75 days, as implemented in w¯otan (Hippke et al. 2019), to generate the flattened light curve for further analysis, and use only data with quality factor of 0. This light curve can be seen in Figure 1. The simple aperture photometric light curve has a scatter of 2527 ppm, which improves to 685 ppm after everest processing.

We searched the flattened data for periodic transit signals using the transit least squares algorithm (TLS) (Hippke & Heller 2019), and found a prominent peak around 3.14 days as can be seen in Figure 2. We assessed the presence of additional candidate signals after modeling out the 3.14-d signal by re-running TLS, but did not find any with a significant signal detection efficiency (i.e., SDE>10).

2.2. Candidate Vetting with SPECULOOS Telescopes

We followed up on the planetary candidate by observing with SPECULOOS Southern Observatory (SSO) two transit windows on UT 25 February 2020 by Ganymede and on UT 18 March 2020 by Io, and one transit window with SPECULOOS Northern Observa-.

tory on UT 18 May 2020 by Artemis. SSO is composed of four telescopes: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, which are installed at ESO Paranal Observatory (Chile) and have been operational since January 2018. SNO is currently composed of one telescope (Artemis), which is located at the Teide Observatory (Canary Islands, Spain) and operational since June 2019. All SPECULOOS telescopes are identical robotic Ritchey-Chretien (F/8) telescopes with an aperture of 1-m. They are equipped with Andor iKon-L cameras with e2v 2K × 2K deep-depletion CCDs, which provide a Field of View (FoV) of 12 0 × 12 0 and the corresponding pixel scale is 0.35 00 pixel−1 (Delrez et al. 2018; Jehin et al. 2018). To schedule those windows we used the SPeculoos Observatory sChedule maKer (SPOCK), described in Sebastian et al. (in prep.). Observations were made with an exposure time of 40 s in an I+z filter, a custom filter (transmittance >90% from 750 nm to beyond 1000 nm) designed for the observation of faint red targets usually observed by the SPECULOOS survey (Delrez et al. 2018; Murray et al. 2020). SSO data were then processed using the SSO Pipeline, which accounts for the water vapor effects known to be significant for differential photometry of redder hosts with bluer comparison stars (Murray et al. 2020). SNO data were processed using prose, a Python-based data reduction package, which generates light curves from raw images (Garcia et al. in prep.). It creates a stacked image to extract the positions of the stars in the field, and uses the positions to perform aperture annulus photometry. A differential light curve is produced using a weighted light curve derived from the field stars, while the instrumental systematics, such as pointing shift and full width half maximum, are recorded to assist later in detrending. We show detrended light curves from SPECULOOS in Figure 3, where we recovered the transit events within 1σ of the calculated ephemeris from K2 data. Since these observations were obtained two years after K2 Campaign 15, they improve the precision of the transit ephemeris by an order of magnitude.