The needle in the haystack: Searching for transiting extrasolar planets inCoRoTstellar light curves

Abstract

exotrans is a software package developed by the Department of Planetary Research of the Rheinisches Institut für Umweltforschung (RIU-PF) at Cologne University for detecting transit signals from extrasolar planets in stellar light curves. exotrans is used very successfully by RIU-PF within theCoRoTmission. The software package uses two different filter algorithms for pre-whitening and noise reduction (harmonic and trend filtering). Three different box-fitting least-squares algorithms (BLS) are applied in order to extract a potential transit signal from the light curves. The performance of each filter-BLS-algorithm combination on realCoRoTdata is presented and compared with other methods used by theCoRoTteam. © 2011 The Authors Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2011 RAS.