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A number of transiting, potentially habitable Earth-sized exoplanets have recently been detected around several nearby M dwarf stars. These worlds represent important targets for atmospheric characterization for the upcoming NASA James Webb…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has a goal of detecting small planets orbiting stars bright enough for mass determination via ground-based radial velocity observations. Here we present estimates of how many exoplanets the…
The most abundant stars in the Galaxy, M dwarfs, are very commonly hosts to diverse systems of low-mass planets. Their abundancy implies that the general occurrence rate of planets is dominated by their occurrence rate around such M dwarfs.…
[Abridged] It is expected that the ongoing and future space-borne planet survey missions including TESS, PLATO, and Earth 2.0 will detect thousands of small to medium-sized planets via the transit technique, including over a hundred…
We use the optical and near-infrared photometry from the Kepler Input Catalog to provide improved estimates of the stellar characteristics of the smallest stars in the Kepler target list. We find 3897 dwarfs with temperatures below 4000K,…
Searching for transits provides a very promising technique for finding close-in extra-solar planets. Transiting planets present the advantage of allowing one to determine physical properties such as mass and radius unambiguously. The…
Transit observations have found the majority of exoplanets to date. Spectroscopic observations of transits and eclipses are the most commonly used tool to characterize exoplanet atmospheres and will be used in the search for life. However,…
Giant planets within the habitable zones of the closest several stars can currently be imaged with ground-based telescopes. Within the next decade, the Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) will begin to image the habitable zones of a greater…
One of the main goals of the NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission is the discovery of Earth-like planets around nearby M-dwarf stars. Here, we present the discovery and validation of three new short-period Earth-sized…
The main scientific goal of TESS is to find planets smaller than Neptune around stars that are bright enough to allow for further characterization studies. Given our current instrumentation and detection biases, M dwarfs are prime targets…
The primary difficulty with using transits to discover extrasolar planets is the low probability a planet has of transiting its parent star. One way of overcoming this difficulty is to search for transits in dense stellar fields, such as…
TESS is expected to discover dozens of temperate terrestrial planets orbiting M dwarfs whose atmospheres could be followed up with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Currently, the TRAPPIST-1 system serves as a benchmark to determine…
Small, cool planets represent the typical end-products of planetary formation. Studying the archi- tectures of these systems, measuring planet masses and radii, and observing these planets' atmospheres during transit directly informs…
Cold Jovian planets play an important role in sculpting the dynamical environment in which inner terrestrial planets form. The core accretion model predicts that giant planets cannot form around low-mass M dwarfs, although this idea has…
The prospects for the habitability of M-dwarf planets have long been debated, due to key differences between the unique stellar and planetary environments around these low-mass stars, as compared to hotter, more luminous Sun-like stars.…
Discoveries from the prime Kepler mission demonstrated that small planets (< 3 Earth-radii) are common outcomes of planet formation. While Kepler detected many such planets, all but a handful orbit faint, distant stars and are not amenable…
The proposed Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will survey the entire sky to locate the nearest and brightest transiting extrasolar planets with orbital periods up to about 36 days. Here we estimate the number and kind of…
Context. Low mass stars are currently the best targets for searches for rocky planets in the habitable zone of their host star. Over the last 13 years, precise radial velocities measured with the HARPS spectrograph have identified over a…
We present robust planet occurrence rates for Kepler planet candidates around M stars for planet radii $R_p = 0.5-4~\textrm{R}_\oplus$ and orbital periods $P = 0.5-256$ days using the approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) technique. This…
We present the results of an extensive study of the detectability of Earth-sized planets and super-Earths in the habitable zones of cool and low-mass stars using transit timing variation method. We have considered a system consisting of a…