Transits in Poorly Sampled Data – Gaia and Beyond

Abstract

Gaia, an ESA cornerstone mission, will obtain of the order of 100 high-precision photometric observations over five years for tens of millions of stars with V < 17. The vast number of red dwarfs in this data set, with their correspondingly deep (high S/N) transits, makes it worthwhile to explore the possibility of detecting transits in such data. Searching for transits under these circumstances requires a very different approach from that used for a normal, highly-sampled transit survey if the search is to be performed in a reasonable amount of time. It should be possible to identify a portion of the transiting Hot Jupiter/M dwarf systems in the data set, if the photometry is as stable and precise as specified by design. This same approach could be applied to ground-based transit searches – a transit survey targeted at red dwarfs with Jupiter-sized companions.