Scintillation noise in exoplanet transit photometry

Abstract

Transit photometry is a powerful technique for studying exoplanets. Transit observations from the ground of targets of magnitude V= 10 or brighter, however, are limited by scintillation noise due to Earth's atmosphere. Through turbulence profiling using instruments such as the stereo-SCIDAR, we have shown to able to accurately model scintillation noise, which is essential in order to fully account for the error budget of the observation. Through numerical modelling we find that employing scintillation reducing techniques enables an improvement of a factor between 1.36 - 1.6 on the astrophysical parameters.