Physical properties and CNO abundances for high-mass stars in four main-sequence detached eclipsing binaries: V478 Cyg, AH Cep, V453 Cyg, and V578 Mon

Abstract

We present ten high-precision light curves of four transits in the XO-1 planetary system, obtained using u, g, r, redshifted Ha, I and z filters. We use these to measure the physical properties, orbital ephemeris, and a transmission spectrum of the planet covering the full optical wavelength range. We augment this with published HST/WFC3 observations to construct a transmission spectrum of the planet covering 0.37 to 1.65 µm. Our best-fitting model to this spectrum is for a H2/He-rich atmosphere containing water (3.05s confidence), nitrogen-bearing molecules NH3 and HCN (1.5s) and patchy cloud (1.3s). We find that adding the optical to the near-infrared data does not lead to more precise constraints on the planetary atmosphere in this case. We conduct a detailed investigation into the effect of stellar limb darkening on our results, concluding that the choice of limb darkening law and coefficients is unimportant; such conclusions may not hold for other systems so should be reassessed for all high-quality datasets. The planet radius we measure in the g-band is anomalously low and should be investigated with future observations at a higher spectral resolution. From the measured times of transit we determine an improved orbital ephemeris, calculate a lower limit on the modified stellar tidal quality factor of Q'?>105.6, and rule out a previously postulated sinusoidal variation in the transit times.