Related papers: An Extrasolar Planet Census with a Space-based Mic…
Free-floating planets are recently drawing a special interest of the scientific community. Gravitational microlensing is up to now the exclusive method for the investigation of free-floating planets, including their spatial distribution…
Most of our knowledge of planets orbiting nearby stars comes from Doppler surveys. For spaced-based, high-contrast imaging missions, nearby stars with Doppler-discovered planets are attractive targets. The known orbits tell imaging missions…
We demonstrate that gravitational lensing can be used to discover and study planets in the habitable zones of nearby dwarf stars. If appropriate software is developed, a new generation of monitoring programs will automatically conduct a…
The mass and distance functions of free-floating planets (FFPs) would give major insights into the formation and evolution of planetary systems, including any systematic differences between those in the disk and bulge. We show that the only…
With over 1800 planets discovered outside of the Solar System in the past two decades, the field of exoplanetology has broadened our perspective on planetary systems. Research priorities are now moving from planet detection to planet…
We compare potential state-of-the-art experiments for detecting Earth-mass planets around main-sequence stars using radial velocities, transits, astrometry, and microlensing. For conventionally-discussed signal-to-noise ratio (S/N)…
The vast majority of known extrasolar planets orbit stars with a narrow range of masses (0.7-1.3 M_sun). Recent years have seen rapid growth in our knowledge about the properties of planetary systems with host stars significantly more…
We present an analytic model to estimate the capabilities of space missions dedicated to the search for biosignatures in the atmosphere of rocky planets located in the habitable zone of nearby stars. Relations between performance and…
Planetary systems toward the Galactic Bulge can be detected through microlensing measurements. The microlensing planet search technique has some unique merits: low-mass planets can be detected from the ground; the Galactic family of…
The new generation of observatories and instruments (VLT/ERIS, JWST, ELT) motivate the development of robust methods to detect and characterise faint and close-in exoplanets. Molecular mapping and cross-correlation for spectroscopy use…
The two Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) missions aim to perform spectroscopy on extrasolar Earths; TPF-C will operate in visible light, and TPF-I will operate in the mid-infrared. Extrasolar Earths are assumed to be roughly 26 magnitude in…
Exoplanets, short for `extra solar planets', are planets outside our solar system. They are objects with masses less than around 15 Jupiter-masses that orbit stars other than the Sun. They are small enough so they can not burn deuterium in…
We present a novel method for direct detection and characterization of exoplanets from space. This method uses four collecting telescopes, combined with phase chopping and a spectrometer, with observations on only a few baselines rather…
We show that space-based microlensing experiments can recover lens masses and distances for a large fraction of all events (those with individual photometric errors <~ 0.01 mag) using a combination of one-dimensional microlens parallaxes…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
Several tools have been developed in the past few years for the statistical analysis of the exoplanet search surveys, mostly using a combination of Monte-Carlo simulations or a Bayesian approach.Here we present the Quick-MESS, a grid-based,…
Radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial amounts of large telescope time in order to monitor a sufficient number of stars. Two of the aspects which can limit such surveys are the single-object…
An extremely sensitive all-sky survey will be carried out in the millimetre/submillimetre waveband by the forthcoming ESA mission Planck Surveyor. The main scientific goal of the mission is to make very accurate measurements of the spatial…
Astrometry can detect rocky planets in a broad range of masses and orbital distances and measure their masses and three-dimensional orbital parameters, including eccentricity and inclination, to provide the properties of terrestrial…
We show that exoplanets in the M31 galaxy may be detected with the pixel-lensing method by using telescopes making high cadence observations of an ongoing microlensing event. Although the mean mass for detectable exoplanets is about $2…