AU Mic is a young (12 Myr), nearby (9.9 pc) M1Ve star in the ß-Pic moving group with a debris disk that was recently imaged in scattered optical light. The disk appears to be nearly edge-on in high resolution ACS images. The image photometric contours within 50 AU of the star can be represented with a disk inclined by 1° to our line of sight (Krist et al. 2004). We have obtained multi-band photometric monitoring data of this young, low mass star to search for transiting extra-solar planets orbiting in the plane of the debris disk. The data were obtained over 28 nights with the CTIO/SMARTS-1m telescope and Y4KCam detector in four narrow bands between 4500 and 6600 Ang.
In this talk, we present the rationale for the project. We briefly discuss how the available submm, mid-IR, and adaptive optics observations on this target suggest the existence of planet sized objects orbiting the star. We then describe our new monitoring campaign designed to detect the stellar brightness variations caused by any such objects transiting in the plane of the debris disk. The following paper (Ford et al. 2006) will present the lightcurves and discuss the data quality.
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