Prioritized star list!

When I met with Sasha and Prof. Knutson in early August, we planned to do two general things.
(per Sasha)

1) coordinate with Professor Knutson to identify additional promising targets to insert into the CPS queue while the Kepler field is still available, and the number of HiRES nights is still pretty high (Aug to early fall).  These included particularly compelling targets that we may have excluded in the initial selection due to their low declination, unpublished status, etc.  August will likely be a unique opportunity to get some of these additional targets for the forseeable future. In addition, I revisited the Cold Friends proposal to look for any other particularly compelling misaligned, highly eccentric systems, or new systems indicated by Heather's personal spreadsheet.

2) get my recent study of the mass/period parameter space to a good place, working with Sasha and Tim to create a code using a Monte Carlo approach that addresses the feasibility of detecting a linear trend using the RV_Lin code and picking an observing window, eccentricity, random phase, and a given precision.  This will be an important piece of machinery to understanding the scientific limits of our program, and our ability to place constraints on these transiting systems.

The first part was accomplished well, and that's what will be discussed below. The simulation coding will be left for another post.

We were able, over the summer, to send out two shortlists of promising targets that were successfully added and observed! The following stars were sent to Professor Andrew Howard at Berkeley:

For July:  WASP-10  WASP-17  WASP-2  WASP-38  WASP-6  TrES-4
For August and September:  WASP-8  HAT-P-14  HAT-P-6  WASP-1  CoRoT-3  HAT-P-17  TrES-1 TrES-2  HAT-P-5  HAT-P-8  CoRoT-2

This was very great news. Now, to pick the stars, we followed the same justifications (eccentric, misaligned, radial velocity trend) but with the added optimization of looking at a few very specific items. First, we wanted to know the number of times CPS has observed these stars, as a lower count would be reason to increase the data set. Also, I looked at the date of the last CPS observation; if a year or more had passed, this greatly increased the priority of the star. Next, as insurance, we looked at the number of observations in the literature (pulled from exoplanets.org) which was instrumental in checking if other consortiums or projects had already well-characterized the orbit (by extra radial velocity curves) of our transiting planet. If this number was larger than the CPS observations, I assumed the star was not as important. Finally, I took the summerlst.pro procedure from earlier, and used it to find all the best observation nights of each individual star.

In conclusion, we had stars with their i) count of observations, ii) date of last observation, and iii) date of best observation, as well as iv) characteristics that made it more likely for the system to have multiple planets. It is now a matter of choosing a combination of orbital traits and the observation records, then matching it up with the best date of observation.

I set up an update 'pipeline' of sorts, with clear instructions on how to update the database with new transiting planets and new CPS observations. The instructions are below, but without the attachments. If wanted, they are easily provided.

I've included 

1) kbcvelreader.pro, which needs a) kbcvel.txt (untarred) and a file you can create called b) transitlistkeckname.txt, with the Keck names of stars you want to search kbcvel for. These files should be saved in your idl !path

2) kbcvel.ascii.tar.gzip, updated through 11 July 2011

3) transitlistkeckname.txt, with just the first 9 keck names from your list 

4) ListTwo.xlsx, which is your list of stars, with relevant information on Sheet 1. This is where RA, DEC, Vmag, Vsini, Ecc, linear trend, spin-orbit misalignment, and Obs in the literature, Keck Name, number of CPS obs, the MJD of the last CPS obs, and the last CPS obs in year/month/day formate, and the best observing night are stored.

5) summerlst.pro, which takes a file of RAs (in decimal hours) and a year, and prints out the date the star is best observed at. 

You will need

1) a file with RAs if you want to run summerlst.pro to find the day the star is best observed at

Instructions

0) updates:

   a) Update kbcvel with the new observations by CPS. I do this by unziping and untarring kbcvel.ascii.tar.gzip, exporting it to excel by i) making the headers are one string (underscores instead of spaces), then ii) delimited columns by spaces, with sequencial delimiters counting as one, and 3) shifting the first >~28000 rows of the first column left by deleting them. There might be a better way. Then I save it as kbcvel.txt.

   b) Update ListTwo with new transiting planets and their relevant information. This means:

NAME RA(hrs)   RA(deg)   DEC(deg)   Vmag Vsini Ecc λ Spin_Orbit_Mis. Obs_in_the_lit Keck_Name 

The rest of the rows will be dealt with soon 

because Keck/Andrew Howard needs RA and DEC in degrees and Vmag, and the others are interesting to the project.

1) run kbcvel.pro. This simply needs a kbcvel.txt and a transitlistkeckname.txt with all the keck names of the stars you are interested in finding 

   a) number of CPS obs 

   b) the MJD of the last CPS obs 

   c) the last CPS obs in more readable date format

Output is first an array of the stars (keckname), then an array of the count of CPS obs, then an array of the MJD, then the readable date of the last observation date. You can cut and paste these last three directly to excel columns L, M, and N.

2) run summerlst.pro:

   summerlst, 'RAfile.txt', year, /DEG

   although the year is optional, and the optional keyword /DEG is if your file has RA in decimal degrees. You can cut and paste the printed output into column O of ListTwo.xlsx.

Yep. I have my ListTwo.xlsx, which is my final product of all transiting systems, and my earlier ColdFriendsList.xlsx, with my ranked 42 top systems to investigate for cold companion planets. These are a good look at my work done.

A condensed version of my concerns and Professor Knutson's subsequent replies are below; they're really good! The kecknames, a better Vmag, and hopefully coordinate searching rather than searching by name would be an amazing idea.


Here are some answers to your questions:

1) Is WASP-13 really both htr180-001 and wasp13 for keck?

Good catch!  What led you to conclude that these are both the same star-- did you check the coordinates in the log sheets, or do you have another way of looking up observations?  It's entirely possible that WASP-13 would have a HAT candidate number-- both of these surveys observed overlapping fields, and sometimes it has been a race to see who could publish a new planet first.  Did you check to see if any other WASP planets might have been observed under htr names?

2) I think my vmag might be wrong sometimes, as they're collected from various sites. Actually about 10 different sites/papers, which included wikipedia for some kepler ones and directly from discovery papers for others (which might be outdated). So this column needs to be checked.

As Prof. Johnson mentioned, for brighter (i.e., non-Kepler) stars, SIMBAD is a good resource. You can search by star name, including names like WASP-7 or HAT-P2, or by coordinates.  In a pinch you can also probably use the Kepler magnitude or the R band magnitude instead-- just remember to flag these objects so you remember that what you used wasn't the actual V band magnitude.  For signal-to-noise calculations, any of these three magnitudes should give you equivalent answers.

3) I left vsini; as you said it's probably even better for it to have a high rotation but this way you'll have this data too!

Yes, it's useful to know vsini, both for calculating the predicted measurement precision and also for flagging systems that might be favorable targets for measuring spin-orbit alignment.

4) I really don't want to guess for keck names. There are a lot that are hrt###-### and these seem sorta random. It would be very, very nice to be able to look at a database for these and figure out for sure which keck name/names correlate with which star for certain. So I left these blank.

I know that if they have a HD or, lacking that, a HIP number these are generally it, but Kepler objects really throw me off.

Perhaps Sasha or John have some good suggestions here-- it seems like there must be a way to search the Keck data base by coordinates rather than by object name, which would ensure that we really were finding all of the observations for a given object.

The only significant data that is missing is the CPS observation count and the date (in MJD and written out) of the last observation (columns L, M, N), because of missing Keck names.

Also, I checked the wasp discovery papers (for those greater than wasp-34) and only WASP-48 kind of looked like it had a trend.

Okay, then we should probably include this star in our list of potential targets (perhaps at a bit of a lower priority, depending on how favorable of a target it turns out to be, but we can evaluate that later).

Additionally, Professor Johnson notified us that the names of all transiting stars in the Keck database are found on his computer at ~johnjohn/planets/transit.txt. I will have to figure out how to connect to the server at Cahill and retrieve this.

In conclusion, there's still a little bit of work on this section, but after rechecking these things, we'll be set for a while! Then this project can hopefully find some planets. :p