Related papers: TrES Exoplanets and False Positives: Finding the N…
Ground-based photometric surveys have led to the discovery of six transiting exoplanets, five of which were detected by the OGLE survey. The FLAMES multi-object spectrograph on the VLT has permitted a very efficient follow-up of the OGLE…
Many ground-based photometric surveys are now under way, and five of them have been successful at detecting transiting exoplanets. Nevertheless, detecting transiting planets has turned out to be much more challenging than initially…
The recently launched Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is expected to produce many new exoplanet discoveries which will be especially amenable to follow-up study. Assessments of the planet discovery yield of TESS, such as…
K2-2 b/HIP 116454 b, the first exoplanet discovery by K2 during its Two-Wheeled Concept Engineering Test, is a sub-Neptune (2.5 $\pm$ 0.1 $R_\oplus$, 9.7 $\pm$ 1.2 $M_\oplus$) orbiting a relatively bright (KS = 8.03) K-dwarf on a 9.1 day…
Over 30% of the ~4000 known exoplanets to date have been discovered using 'validation', where the statistical likelihood of a transit arising from a false positive (FP), non-planetary scenario is calculated. For the large majority of these…
For years, scientists have used data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to look for and discover thousands of transiting exoplanets. In its extended K2 mission, Kepler observed stars in various regions of sky all across the ecliptic plane,…
Over 300 extrasolar planets have been found since 1992, showing that planetary systems are common and exhibit an outstanding variety of characteristics. As the number of detections grows and as models of planet formation progress to account…
Transiting exoplanets in multi-planet systems have non-Keplerian orbits which can cause the times and durations of transits to vary. The theory and observations of transit timing variations (TTV) and transit duration variations (TDV) are…
Pulsations and binarity are both common features of massive stars. The study of pulsating massive stars in eclipsing binary systems hold great potential for constraining stellar structure and evolution theory. However, prior to the all-sky…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
Straight-forward derivation of planetary parameters can only be achieved in transiting planetary systems. However, planetary attributes such as radius and mass strongly depend on stellar host parameters. Discovering a transit host star to…
We present a study of the detection efficiency for the TESS mission, focusing on the yield of longer-period transiting exoplanets ($P > 25$ days). We created the Transit Investigation and Recoverability Application (TIaRA) pipeline to use…
We report on the discovery and validation of a two-planet system around a bright (V = 8.85 mag) early G dwarf (1.43 $R_{\odot}$, 1.15 $M_{\odot}$, TOI 2319) using data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Three transit…
We present Spitzer Space Telescope infrared photometric time series of the transiting extrasolar planet system TrES-1. The data span a predicted time of secondary eclipse, corresponding to the passage of the planet behind the star. In both…
The vast majority of extrasolar planets are detected by indirect detection methods such as transit monitoring and radial velocity measurements. While these methods are very successful in detecting short-periodic planets, they are mostly…
We present a study of the M dwarf exoplanetary systems forthcoming from NASA's TESS mission. While the mission's footprint is too complex to be characterized by a single detection completeness, we extract an ensemble completeness function…
A large fraction of the smallest transiting planet candidates discovered by the Kepler and CoRoT space missions cannot be confirmed by a dynamical measurement of the mass using currently available observing facilities. To establish their…
Recently the Spitzer Space Telescope observed the transiting extrasolar planets, TrES-1 and HD209458b. These observations have provided the first estimates of the day side thermal flux from two extrasolar planets orbiting Sun-like stars. In…
We determine the starspot detection rate in exoplanetary transit light curves for M and K dwarf stars observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) using various starspot filling factors and starspot distributions. We used…
The WFIRST microlensing mission will measure precise light curves and relative parallaxes for millions of stars, giving it the potential to characterize short-period transiting planets all along the line of sight and into the galactic…