Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Astrophysics and Astronomy

PDF

Astronomy

Butler University

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Using Nasa's Tess Mission To Search For Extremely Low Mass White Dwarf Stars, Corinna Peña May 2022

Using Nasa's Tess Mission To Search For Extremely Low Mass White Dwarf Stars, Corinna Peña

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

Extremely low-mass white dwarf stars (ELM) are white dwarf stars with a mass lower than 0.45 solar masses that could not have evolved through normal processes within the lifetime of our universe. Therefore, these objects can only be created through a common envelope phase or a stable Roche lobe overflow while in a binary. These objects have periods between a few minutes to a few hours, so they are very short lived which makes them very rare. My goal for this project was to find these ELM stars by using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) data. I analyzed this …


Constraining The Parameters Of Six Known Transiting Exoplanets, Mackenzie Lee Jones May 2012

Constraining The Parameters Of Six Known Transiting Exoplanets, Mackenzie Lee Jones

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

We present two new transits of GJ~1214b, five of TrES-lb, two of XO~2b, and one each of TrES~3b)WASP-16b and WASP- 36b. These observations were made with multiple observatories including IRTF-MORIS, Butler University's Holcomb Observatory, SARA-KPNO, and SARA-eTIO. Due to poor conditions and a lack of good comparison stars within the field of view, the parameter values for the radius ratio, inclination, and orbital distance, found for GJ-1214b are not reliable. The timing values, while still suspect, suggest consistency with the current ephemeris. After further analysis, the radius ratio we found for TrES-1b in Sloan r' is 0.0.13501±0.0001l, which differs by …