Exoplanet WASP-10b in Pegasus (fresh discovery)

Dear friends,

During the first week of Jun/2008, the WASP team announced two new exoplanets, namely WASP-10b and WASP-14b. Both of these are significantly heavier than Jupiter and also much more dense.

Although I was hesitatant last night about pursuing the first available transit of WASP-10b for capture due to the low preingress altitude of the host star, I decided to pursue the transit anyway so as get the experience and knowledge surrounding this relatively dim host star (mag 12.70).

The results turned out much better than I expected and it is also interesting to note the prediction for egress does not agree with last night's result, for it seems the total transit of 142 minutes should be greater.

For those interested, I kindly direct them to www.perseus.gr/Astro-Photometry-WASP-10-20080828.htm .

There is another opportunity to capture this transit at the end of the month and with the host star much higher in the sky. It will be interesting to see how my result then will compare with last night's effort.

The discovery team makes reference to tidal effects and which most probably is attributable to the presence of another exoplanet.

Hi Anthony,

Well done recording WASP-10b. Having a 15.5 minute reduction at egress is significant. A reduction of 2 or 3 minutes would still be within the predicted time.
There is a good chance that this may be a conjunction of another planet 'c'.

However, follow up monitoring is important to confirm this observation. In fact, I would follow this up at Kingsland in order to confirm your recording. It would be advantageous if we had simultaneus monitoring of the transit.

I had checked Transit.org and found no predictions for WASP-10b or WASP-14b. I had come across predictions for future transits at some of the major observatories, like McDonald and Keck.

Do you have a link for future transit predictions for both WASP-10b or WASP-14b?

Eamonn A

www.kingslandobservatory.com

Hi Eamonn,

It would be great to pursue a transit simultaneously. The two next transits which are favourable for me with respect to time and altitude are the following:

31-08-2008 - midtransit at 22:23 UT
04-09-2008 - midtransit at 00:37 UT

Since the reported transit duration is 142 minutes and which seems to be long based on my results, one can easily compute the predicted ingress and egress (+/- 71 minutes from the midtransits above).

Hi Anthony,

I will prepare for the first one and second transits assuming it is predicted for Ireland as the same for Greece.

Do you have a website link for future transit predictions for both WASP-10b or WASP-14b?

Eamonn A

Hi Eamonn,

It is almost certain I will be out of action for this evening's transit involving WASP-10 thanks to the bad weather that has hit us the past 24-48 hours.

As for the predicted transits, unfortunately you will not find anything on TransitSearch and it is not very surprising since they are very slow to act.

Since we know the period of revolution with great accuracy (ie. 3.0927616 days), we simply need one sample transit (see my transit results and/or the two predicted transits I provide) and simply add this offset of 3.0927616 days and which translates to 3 days, 2 hours and 14 minutes.

There is also another method which is virtually identical and is based on a base julian date as reported by the discovery team and where we add multiples of the revolutionary period (similar to above).

PS. The paper published by the discovery team is available at fr.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0806/0806.1482v1.pdf .... Table 3 (page 6) provides the transit epoch date (2454357.85803) and this is what I was referring to above.