HD 68988
Extra-Solar Planet System
Light Curve of the star HD68988 Fall 2001 and Winter 2002.
This star has been observed to exhibit Radial Velocity variations
consistent with there being a planet in a 6.276 day orbit around it. See
the Extrasolar Planets
Encyclopaedia information on HD68988.
Using our
automated 0.5 meter telescope.
we take pictures of this star and the nearby stars. In the graph below
the brightness of HD68988 relative to a nearby star is plotted as dots.
Along the left side is magnitudes and along the bottom of the graph is the
orbital phase. Orbital phase is time in fractions of an orbit measured
from where the eclipse would happen. The data points have been combined
into nine point averages.
If the planet transits the disk of the star then the brightness of the
star will go down by about 0.017 and stay at that brightness for about 4
hours as we show with the solid line. I have displaced the eclipse from
the predicted phase of 1.0 because the period is not known perfectly.
We still have a few more phases to observe to make sure the planet does
not eclipse the star.
Send comments/suggestions/problems to robb@
uvic.ca