Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

On The Search For Transits Of The Planets Orbiting Gliese 876, Paul D. Shankland, Eugenio J. Rivera, Gregory Laughlin, D. L. Blank, A. Price, B. Gary, R. Bissinger, Frederick Ringwald, G. White, Gregory W. Henry, Padric Mcgee, Aaron S. Wolf, Brad Carter, S. Lee, James Biggs, Berto Monard, Michael C. B. Ashley

Information Systems and Engineering Management Research Publications

We report the results of a globally coordinated photometric campaign to search for transits by the P ~ 30 day and P ~ 60 day outer planets of the three-planet system orbiting the nearby M dwarf Gl 876. These two planets experience strong mutual perturbations, which necessitate the use of a dynamical (four-body) model to compute transit ephemerides for the system. Our photometric data have been collected from published archival sources, as well as from our photometric campaigns that were targeted to specific transit predictions. Our analysis indicates that transits by planet c (P ~ 30 days) do not currently …