Rare Exoplanet Transits Observed from Antarctica

• Main Authors: Dransfield, Georgina, Triaud, Amaury H. M. J., Guillot, Tristan, Abe, Lyu, Mekarnia, Djamel, Crouzet, Nicolas, Suarez, Olga, Schmider, François-Xavier, Agabi, Karim
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Exoplanets; Transit photometry; Antarctica; TESS; Long period; Warm Neptune; TTV; Warm Jupiter; Austral; Jupiter; South Pole; Antarc*; South pole
• Online Access: https://zenodo.org/record/5129291; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5129291

Of the 870+ southern planetary candidates from TESS currently awaiting confirmation, roughly 10% have transit durations longer than five hours; over a third of these also have orbital periods longer than 20 days. Systems like these could fall into the sparsely populated parameter space of long-period gas giants; but long transits that happen infrequently present an observational challenge from the ground. Not so for ASTEP, a 40cm telescope installed at Dome C in Antarctica. ASTEP’s proximity to the South Pole means that it enjoys outstanding photometric conditions, as well exceptional phase coverage due to uninterrupted observing during the Austral Winter. In this poster I will share some results from ASTEP’s first seasons of SG1 observing, including uninterrupted 10 hour-long transits, TTV monitoring, and the first ever ground-based transit of a circumbinary planet.