Objective
"I propose to lead an international observational effort to characterize the population of massive planets, brown dwarf and stellar secondaries orbiting their parent stars with short periods, up to 10-30 days. The effort will utilize the superb, accurate, continuous lightcurves of more than hundred thousand stars obtained recently by two space missions – CoRoT and Kepler. I propose to use these lightcurves to detect non-transiting low-mass companions with a new algorithm, BEER, which I developed recently together with Simchon Faigler. BEER searches for the beaming effect, which causes the stellar intensity to increase if the star is moving towards the observer. The combination of the beaming effect with other modulations induced by a low-mass companion produces periodic modulation with a specific signature, which is used to detect small non-transiting companions. The accuracy of the space mission lightcurves is enough to detect massive planets with short periods. The proposed project is equivalent to a radial-velocity survey of tens of thousands of stars, instead of the presently active surveys which observe only hundreds of stars.
We will use an assortment of telescopes to perform radial velocity follow-up observations in order to confirm the existence of the detected companions, and to derive their masses and orbital eccentricities. We will discover many tens, if not hundreds, of new massive planets and brown dwarfs with short periods, and many thousands of new binaries. The findings will enable us to map the mass, period, and eccentricity distributions of planets and stellar companions, determine the upper mass of planets, understand the nature of the brown-dwarf desert, and put strong constrains on the theory of planet and binary formation and evolution."
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesastronomyobservational astronomyoptical astronomy
- natural sciencesphysical sciencesastronomyplanetary sciencesplanets
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Call for proposal
ERC-2011-ADG_20110209
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
ERC-AG - ERC Advanced GrantHost institution
69978 Tel Aviv
Israel