Generating X-Ray Transit Profiles with Batman

Abstract

We present an adaptation of the exoplanet transit model code batman , in order to permit the generation of X-ray transits. Our underlying extended coronal model assumes an isothermal plasma that is radially symmetric. While this ignores the effect of bright, active regions, observations of transits in X-rays will require averaging across multiple epochs of data for the foreseeable future, significantly reducing the importance of more complex modeling. Our publicly available code successfully generates the predicted W-shaped transit profile in X-rays due to the optically thin nature of the emission, which concentrates the expected observational emission around the limb of the photospheric stellar disk. We provide some examples based on the best known X-ray transit target, HD 189733 b, and examine the effect of varying the planet size, coronal temperature, and impact parameter on the resulting transit profile. We also derived scaling relationships for how the overall transit detectability is affected by changing these parameters. Over most of the parameter space, we find that the detectability scales linearly with the cross-sectional area of the planet in X-rays. The relationship with increasing coronal temperature is less fixed, but averages out to a power law with slope −1/4 except when the impact parameter is high. Indeed, varying impact parameter has little effect on detectability at all until it approaches unity.

Keywords

• Exoplanet astronomy
• Transits
• X-ray astronomy
• Stellar coronae
• Transit photometry
• Exoplanets