Photometric observation of HAT-P-16b in the near-UV

• We present the first near-UV light curve of HAT-P-16b.
• The magnetic field of HAT-P-16b has been constrained.
• ExoDRPL, Exoplanet Automated Data Reduction pipeline, was developed.
• EXOMOP, Exoplanet Modeling Package, was also developed for this project.

We present the first primary transit light curve of the hot Jupiter HAT-P-16b in the near-UV photometric band. We observed this object on December 29, 2012 in order to update the transit ephemeris, constrain its planetary parameters and search for magnetic field interference. Vidotto et al. (2011a) postulate that the magnetic field of HAT-P-16b can be constrained if its near-UV light curve shows an early ingress compared to its optical light curve, while its egress remains unchanged. However, we did not detect an early ingress in our night of observing when using a cadence of 60 seconds and an average photometric precision of 2.26 mmag. We find a near-UV planetary radius of Rp=1.274±0.057RJupRp=1.274±0.057RJup which is consistent with its near-IR radius of Rp=1.289±0.066RJupRp=1.289±0.066RJup (Buchhave et al., 2010). We developed an automated reduction pipeline and a modeling package to process our data. The data reduction package synthesizes a set of IRAF scripts to calibrate images and perform aperture photometry. The modeling package utilizes the Levenberg–Marquardt minimization algorithm to find a least-squares best fit and a differential evolution Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to find the best fit to the light curve. To constrain the red noise in both fitting models we use the residual permutation (rosary bead) method and time-averaging method.