A Candidate Transit Event around Proxima Centauri

Yiting Li, Gudmundur Stefansson, Paul Robertson, Andrew Monson, Caleb Canas, Suvrath Mahadevan
(Submitted on 12 Dec 2017)

We present a single candidate transit event around Proxima Centauri, found during a blind transit search using a robotic 30\,cm telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. The event lasted 1 hour, with an estimated depth of 5\,mmag, and is inconsistent with the transit window predicted for the recently discovered planet b. We modeled the lightcurve under the assumption that the event was caused by a transiting exoplanet, and our model predicts the planet has a radius $R \sim 1 R_{\oplus}$. We encourage continued monitoring of Proxima to elucidate the origin of this event.

Comments:    3 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for publication in Research Notes of the AAS
Subjects:    Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as:    arXiv:1712.04483 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1712.04483v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Yiting Li
[v1] Tue, 12 Dec 2017 19:44:26 GMT (278kb,D)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04483