Image Source.

I’ll be gone on a trip to the Harvard CfA for the next several days. While I’m there, I’ll be giving a colloquium talk, and in addition, I’ll be trying to extract all the latest research news items from the CfA’s large group of exoplanet researchers. That’ll likely give me some stuff to write about in upcoming posts.

We’ve now closed the Systemic Challenge 002 contest, and I’ll tally up the results on the plane ride home. Look for a post this weekend that will explain what’s going on in the Challenge 002 data set. Eugenio has cooked up a great batch of RVs for the Challenge 003 system, and we’ll be releasing them this coming weekend.

Note that the dates of the challenges are slipping from what was announced in the S&T article. There’ll still be a total of four systems, but the contests will run over two months rather than one as originally planned. As soon as the contests are finished up, we’ll release the “Systemic Jr.” set of 100 trial systems. Based on our experience with these systems, we’ll make any necessary modifications to the simulation profile, and then we’ll be set to start the long-promised full Systemic simulation. In the meantime, keep submitting fits! I’d really like to see the chi-square come down on a dynamically stable configuration for 55 Cancri.

In other news, we’ve now got confirmations for both WASP-1b and WASP-2b.

On Monday, Mike Fleenor, of Volunteer Observatory in Knoxville Tennessee wrote:

I observed a complete transit of WASP-1b last night under very good conditions. My LC shows mid-transit very close to your predicted center. Details are available here.

Last weekend, Joe Garlitz from Elgin Oregon wrote:

Last night (Fri/Sat) I tried for WASP2 and got some data that looks promising. The data is very noisy and I would not feel comfortable about presenting it without some other confirming (hopefully someone else got data) observations.

I have attached a .jpg image of the data chart. The data is really forced to get any kind of “curve”. The solid line represents a running average over 16.25 minutes, 13 data points.

The individual images are 65sec at an interval of 75 sec. The scope is 200mm @ f/8 with a Cookbook 245 CCD, no filters.

Here’s his lightcurve:

Today, Geir Klingenberg from Norway checked in with a confirmation of Garlitz’s result (which he obtained remotely from a telescope in New Mexico:

Hi Joe,

I observed the ingress of this WASP-2 transit, see here.

Seems to fit your data nicely.

I used a robotic telescope at GRAS: 0.3m SCT @ f/11.9 and a FLI IMG1024.

Way to go, guys!