Related papers: TrES Exoplanets and False Positives: Finding the N…
When an exoplanet passes in front of its host star, the resulting eclipse causes an observable decrease in stellar flux, and when multiple such transits are detected, the orbital period of the exoplanet can be determined. Over the past six…
Photometric surveys for exoplanetary ring systems have not confirmed any object with Saturn-sized ring. We systematically analyse 308 TESS planet candidates, mainly comprised of giant short-period planets orbiting nearby bright stars. These…
We present the results of the second year of exoplanet candidate host speckle observations from the SOAR TESS survey. We find 89 of the 589 newly observed TESS planet candidate hosts have companions within 3\arcsec, resulting in light curve…
The upcoming TESS mission will detect thousands of candidate transiting exoplanets. Those candidates require extensive follow-up observations to distinguish genuine planets from false positives, and to resolve the physical properties of the…
The Wide Field Camera Transit Survey is a pioneer program aimed to search for extra-solar planets in the near-infrared. The standard data reduction pipeline of the program uses aperture photometry to construct the light curves. We…
The discovery of circumbinary planets (CBPs) has advanced our understanding of planet formation and dynamical evolution in complex environments. However, the population of such planets remains small, leading their underlying physical…
Wide-field surveys for transiting planets, such as the NASA Kepler and TESS missions, are usually conducted without knowing which stars have binary companions. Unresolved and unrecognized binaries give rise to systematic errors in planet…
Spotted stars in eclipsing binary systems allow us to gather significant information about the stellar surface inhomogeneities that is otherwise impossible from only photometric data. Starspots can be scanned using the eclipse (or transit)…
The first transiting extrasolar planet, orbiting HD209458, was a Doppler wobble planet before its transits were discovered with a 10 cm CCD camera. Wide-angle CCD cameras, by monitoring in parallel the light curves of tens of thousands of…
The detection of small planets orbiting nearby stars is an important step towards the identification of Earth twins. In previous work using the Spitzer Space Telescope, we found evidence to support at least one sub-Earth-sized exoplanet…
Over two decades of exoplanetology have yielded thousands of discoveries, yet some types of systems are yet to be observed. Circumstellar planets around one star in a binary have been found, but not for tight binaries (< 5 AU).…
Although the architectures of compact multiple-planet systems are well-characterized, there has been little examination of their "outer edges", or the locations of their outermost planets. Here we present evidence that the observed…
We present photometry of the exoplanet host star TrES-3 spanning six occultations (secondary eclipses) of its giant planet. No flux decrements were detected, leading to 99%-confidence upper limits on the planet-to-star flux ratio of…
We introduce a new transit search and vetting pipeline for observations from the K2 mission, and present the candidate transiting planets identified by this pipeline out of the targets in Campaigns 5 and 6. Our pipeline uses the Gaussian…
Ten days of commissioning data (Quarter 0) and thirty-three days of science data (Quarter 1) yield instrumental flux timeseries of ~150,000 stars that were combed for transit events, termed Threshold Crossing Events (TCE), each having a…
We present a new method for differentiating between planetary transits and eclipsing binaries based on the presence of the ellipsoidal light variations. These variations can be used to detect stellar secondaries with masses ~0.2 M_sun…
We introduce our PhD project in which we focus on pulsating stars in eclipsing binaries. The combination of high-precision Kepler photometry with high-resolution HERMES spectroscopy allows for detailed descriptions of our sample of target…
Planets emit thermal radiation and reflect incident light that they recieve from their host stars. As a planet orbits it's host star the photometric variations associated with these two effects produce very similar phase curves. If observed…
We present here the results of our observations of TrES-2 using the Infrared Array Camera on Spitzer. We monitored this transiting system during two secondary eclipses, when the planetary emission is blocked by the star. The resulting…
In recent years the number of exoplanets has grown considerably. The most successful techniques in these detections are the radial velocity (RV) and planetary transits techniques, the latter significantly advanced by the Kepler, K2 and,…