Paul Shankland has been visiting Santa Cruz this week, and everyone agrees that it’s about time to get the GJ 876 transit situation sewed up once and for all. Aquarius is still up in the early evening, and a planet “c” transit opportunity is bearing down with 30.1 day semi-clockwork precision. So out went the following alert to the transitsearch.org e-mail list:

Thursday Afternoon, Nov. 17, 2005

Dear Transitsearch Observers,

We’d like to alert you to an opportunity to check the GJ 876 system for planetary transits. Photometry is desired during a twelve-hour window centered on JD2453693.491 (Friday Nov. 18, 23:47 UT).

As you have likely heard, the GJ 876 system was recently found to harbor a low-mass (7.5 Earth Mass) planet on a 1.94 day orbit. The new planet is referred to (rather prosaically) as GJ 876 “d”, and is the third planet detected in the GJ 876 system. The discovery paper is scheduled for an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal, and is also available on the astro-ph preprint server: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0510508

Sadly, transits for planet “d” have been ruled out to high confidence.

As a result, however, of (1) inclusion of the third planet in the dynamical model for the system, and (2) a large number of new high-precision radial velocities, Eugenio Rivera has produced new transit ephemeris predictions for the outer two planets in the GJ 876 system. These differ by several hours from the dynamical predictions that are currently posted on the transitsearch.org candidates site, e.g.:

http://www.ucolick.org/~laugh/GJ876____c.transits.txt

We’re working through an extensive analysis which shows that neither “b” nor “c” is transiting, but this analysis is nevertheless in great need of observational verification. There is a conflict between dynamical fits to the radial velocities (which indicate that the system is inclined by 50 degrees to the plane of the sky) and the results of Benedict et al (2002, ApJL 581, 115), who used HST to get astrometric measurements that suggest a nearly edge-on configuration.

We’d thus like to request photometry of the star to six hours on either side of JD2453693.491 (Friday Nov. 18, 23:47 UT).

Information regarding observing GJ 876 and photometry submission instructions are at:

http://www.aavso.org/news/ilaqr.shtml

Additional background is on the transitsearch GJ 876 results page:

http://www.ucolick.org/%7elaugh/GJ876____c.results.html

Note that this page states that the photometric campaign is over, but the new dynamical model indicates that more photometry is desirable.

Other observing opportunities are (were) as follows:

For planet c (the middle one):

predicted central transit (UT)
————————————
2005 Aug. 20 15:40
2005 Sep. 19 18:41
2005 Oct. 19 20:53
2005 Nov. 18 23:47
2005 Dec. 19 01:36

For planet b (the outer one):
————————–
2005 Aug. 22 17:28
2005 Oct. 22 17:34
2005 Dec. 22 18:05

Finally, we’d like to thank everyone for being patient over the 8 months, during which we have not been running coordinated campaigns. With Shankland of USNO “on the bridge”, we’re now ramping up for a more active phase. Stay tuned!