An analysis of noise in the CoRoT data

Abstract

In this thesis, publically available data from the French/ESA satellite mission CoRoT, designed to seek out extrasolar planets, was analyzed using MATLAB. CoRoT attempts to observe the transits of these planets across their parent stars. CoRoT occupies an orbit which periodically carries it through the Van Allen Belts, resulting in a very high level of high outliers in the flux data. Known systematics and outliers were removed from the data and the remaining scatter was evaluated using the median of absolute deviations from the median (MAD), a measure of scatter which is robust to outliers. The level of scatter (evaluated with MAD) present in this data is indicative of the lower limits on the size of planets detectable by CoRoT or a similar satellite. The MAD for CoRoT stars is correlated with the magnitude. The brightest stars observed by CoRoT display scatter of approximately 0.02 percent, while the median value for all stars is 0.16 percent.