KELT: The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope, a Survey for Exoplanets Transiting Bright, Hot Stars

Understand

The KELT project was originally designed as a small-aperture, wide-field photometric survey that would be optimally sensitive to planets transiting bright (V~8-10) stars.

• This magnitude range corresponded to the gap between the faint magnitude limit where radial velocity surveys were complete, and the bright magnitude limit for transiting planet hosts routinely found by dedicated ground-based transit surveys.
• Malmquist bias and other factors have also led the KELT survey to focus on discovering planets transiting relatively hot host stars as well.
• To date, the survey has discovered 22 transiting hot Jupiters, including some of the brightest transiting planet host stars known to date.