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- No 2 - Proceeedings of the 3rd BINA Workshop on th...
- Analytical Lightcurves for Transiting Exomoons
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Analytical Lightcurves for Transiting Exomoons
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Transit photometry has remained the most effective technique to detect and characterize exoplanets. As thousands of exoplanets have been discovered in the last few decades, the possibility of the existence of exomoons in some of these systems can not be avoided. However, the detection of exomoons has still remained elusive, owing to their much smaller expected size compared to their planetary host. With the advent of next generation space telescopes and large ground based telescopes, the possibility to detect them is imminent in near future. In such scenario, a comprehensive analytical formalism to model the transit lightcurves of a transiting exomoon hosting system will be necessary to confirm their detection and study their physical and dynamical characteristics. Here, I present such an analytical formulation, that can be used to simulate the transit lightcurves for an exoplanetary system hosting transiting exomoons. This formalism uses the physical and orbital properties of the three-body star-planet-moon system, to solve their orbital dynamics, and model the transit lightcurves for every possible physical scenarios. In this report, various aspects of this analytical formalism has been discussed, and the model lightcurves for a few of the practical scenarios have been presented.