NGC 7086

A Search for transiting plannets in the cluster NGC 7086



This is a color picture of the open cluster NGC 7086. It is reddened by dust between us and the cluster.


This is a color-magnitude diagram of the cluster which plots the color of the stars against the brightness. The stars in the cluster are found along the main sequence. The variable stars that we discovered are plotted as well.

This is a plot of the brightness of a constant star as a function of the Universal Time and for each night. The red dip is the size and shape that we would expect for a Jupiter sized planet in a 3 day orbit eclipsing a solar type star.

This is a similar plot of a variable star. This is an eclipsing binary star and the dips in brightness are caused when one of the stars comes in front of the other star blocking out its light. The scattered points in the sixth night are from clouds coming across the telescope while we were observing and can be disregarded since they occrued in all the stars.


This is a pretty complicted plot of the brightness of the star observed against the precision with which we measured the star. The lower line is the theoretical measurement error and the upper line is the limit below which we could have seen a planet tranist.

This is a plot of the brightness changes of one of the variable stars that we discovered in NGC 7086. This is a binary star where one star eclipses the light from the other star. We can make a computer model based on estimates of the size and temperature (etc) which is supposed to match the data. Unfortunately the fit is not so good?!?!?!?