SIMBAD references

With the growing number of projects dedicated to the search for extrasolar planets via transits, there is a need to develop fast, automatic, robust methods with a statistical background in order to carry out the analysis efficiently. We propose a modified analysis of variance (AoV) test particularly suitable for the detection of planetary transits in stellar light curves. We show how labour savings of a factor of over 10 could be achieved by the careful organization of computations. Based on solid analytical statistical formulations, we discuss the performance of our and other methods for different signal-to-noise ratios and numbers of observations.