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The Perkins INfrared Exosatellite Survey (PINES): Survey Overview and Early Results

Presentation #102.116 in the session Poster Session.

Published onJun 20, 2022
The Perkins INfrared Exosatellite Survey (PINES): Survey Overview and Early Results

We present the Perkins INfrared Exosatellite Survey (PINES), a near-infrared search for short-period transiting planets and moons around a sample of 393 spectroscopically confirmed L- and T-type dwarfs. PINES is performed with Boston University’s 1.8 m Perkins Telescope Observatory, located on Anderson Mesa, Arizona. We describe the observational strategy of the survey, which was designed to optimize the number of expected transit detections using an injection/recovery simulation. We assess the impact of second-order extinction due to changing precipitable water vapor on our observations and find that the magnitude of this effect is minimized in the Mauna Kea Observatories J-band filter used by PINES. We describe our analysis pipeline and demonstrate its validity through the recovery of a transit of WASP-2 b and known variable brown dwarfs, and use it to identify a new variable L/T transition object: the T2 dwarf WISE J045746.08-020719.2. We report on the measured photometric precision of the survey and use it to estimate our transit detection sensitivity, finding that we are sensitive to the detection of 2.5 REarth planets and larger for our median brightness targets. PINES will place new limits on the occurrence rates of super-Earths around L and T dwarfs and will test whether such occurrence rates are consistent with those measured for M dwarfs.

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