Exoplanet Transit Search at Dome C

Abstract

We study the potential impact of a photometric search for transiting exoplanets from Dome C. In the past year, four new transiting exoplanets have been found by ground-based surveys, including three detected by our follow-up of OGLE transit candidates with FLAMES/UVES on the VLT. Based on the experience of this survey, we have built a simulation to predict the expected number of transiting exoplanet detections from photometric searches. We apply these simulations to a possible survey based at Concordia. We find that the Antarctica location solves the two main limitations of ground-based transit surveys: the diurnal-cycle time sampling, and the hour-timescale systematic photometric variations. The expected numbers of detections are much larger than for other ground-based surveys. They show the high potential of such projects at Dome C, even with a small telescope.