The potential of integral field spectroscopy observing extrasolar planet transits

Abstract

We explore the use of Integral Field Spectroscopy (IFS) for observing extrasolar planet transits. We show that IFS can improve the photometric accuracy in high S/N time series observations with respect to standard slit spectrophotometry. Ground based observations of HD209458b obtained with WHT + INTEGRAL during a transit have led to an accuracy in relative spectrophotometry (i.e line/continuum) not far from that expected by photon noise. This result indicates that these types of ground based observations can constrain the characterization of the transmission spectrum of extrasolar planets. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.