Abstract EANA2025-96

The search for exomoons is crucial in astrobiology science. Their presence directly affects the habitability of a terrestrial or super-Earth planet, as the tidal forces enhance iron core convection, thereby strengthening the magnetic field that protects the exoplanet from the star's aggressive radiation and supports the biosphere. In cases where a giant gaseous planet resides within the habitable zone (HZ), its moon would also lie within that region, thus becoming a plausible site for biological activity.

We proposed 12 Kepler targets with potential exomoon candidates, including 8 unconfirmed exoplanets for photometric observations at a 1.6 m telescope located in the Mont-Mégantic Observatory (OMM). The goals of observations are to verify their planetary nature and refine their physical and orbital parameters. Six of these candidates have long periods (>70 days), making their transit observation infrequent and difficult to detect. Capturing these rare events contributes to filling observational gaps in long-period regimes.

Our selected targets represent a diverse range of planetary types: 4 Jupiter-sized, 4 Neptune-sized, 2 mini-Neptunes, and 2 super-Earths. Several of the researched exoplanets are located in the habitable zone (HZ), and we compared three theoretical HZ models, including observable parameters obtained at the OMM. We used the Gaussian process to detrend and remove stellar activity from the transit lightcurve and employed the Pandora Python package to simulate exomoon transit signatures under the most favorable observational conditions.

Observations of confirmed exoplanets (Kepler-27, Kepler-397, Kepler-1981, and Kepler-553) were used to calibrate our data reduction technique and contribute to transit timing variation studies.

Additionally, we used models of emission and transmission spectra of several investigated exoplanets for follow-up observations with the future VROOM spectrograph at OMM.