Fields Selection for Transiting Planets Surveys and Application to the TranS Survey

摘要

A significative statistic of planetary transits could be obtained only with the observation of a large number of F, G and K stars. Optimal stellar fields for a wide-field planet search should contain the largest number of these stars. Here we present a new method for the identification of F, G. K dwarfs from near infraread data using the 2MASS point source catalog and the application of this method for the selection of the fields of the TranS project. The main results of this work are: 1) the anticorrelation of high star counts and high counts of Lower Main Sequence Stars (LMSS), that was used by many transit surveys as a criterion for fields selection, 2) the correlation between LMSS counts and the dust scale height on the galactic plane, 3) the natural evidence that the principal contaminants in the counts of LMSS are early dwarfs instead giants.