Related papers: Precise Photometry and Spectroscopy of Transits

Future surveys for transiting extrasolar planets, including the space-based mission Kepler (Borucki et al 2003), are expected to detect hundreds of Jovian mass planets and tens of terrestrial mass planets. For many of these newly discovered…

Future high precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the nature of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light…

Since 2008 we have run an observational program to accurately measure the characteristics of known exoplanet systems hosting close-in transiting giant planets, i.e. hot Jupiters. Our study is based on high-quality photometric follow-up…

Transiting exoplanets provide access to data to study the mass-radius relation and internal structure of extrasolar planets. Long-period transiting planets allow insight into planetary environments similar to the Solar System where, in…

We typically measure the radii of transiting exoplanets from the transit depth, which is given by the ratio of cross-sectional areas of the planet and star. However, if a star has dark starspots (or bright regions) distributed throughout…

The orbital parameters of extra-solar planets have a significant impact on the probability that the planet will transit the host star. This was recently demonstrated by the transit detection of HD 17156b whose favourable eccentricity and…

The stellar obliquity of a transiting planetary system can be constrained by combining measurements of the star's rotation period, radius, and projected rotational velocity. Here we present a hierarchical Bayesian technique for recovering…

Analysis of transit times in exoplanetary systems accurately provides an instantaneous orbital period, $P(t)$, of their member planets. A long-term monitoring of those transiting planetary systems puts limits on the variability of $P(t)$,…

This paper is to introduce an online tool for the prediction of exoplanet transit light curves. Small telescopes can readily capture exoplanet transits under good weather conditions when the combination of a bright star and a large…

Kepler will monitor enough stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the Kepler photometry of such transits with precise radial velocity (RV)…

One possible diagnostic of planet formation, orbital migration, and tidal evolution is the angle psi between a planet's orbital axis and the spin axis of its parent star. In general, psi cannot be measured, but for transiting planets one…

Solar system planets move on almost circular orbits. In strong contrast, many massive gas giant exoplanets travel on highly elliptical orbits, whereas the shape of the orbits of smaller, more terrestrial, exoplanets remained largely…

The initial task that confronted extrasolar-planet transit surveys was to monitor enough stars with sufficient photometric precision and complete phase coverage. Numerous searches have been pursued over the last few years. Among these…

High-resolution transmission spectroscopy is a powerful method for probing the extended atmospheres of short-period exoplanets. With the advancement of ultra-stable echelle spectrographs and the advent of 30-meter class telescopes on the…

Exoplanet host star activity, in the form of unocculted star spots or faculae, alters the observed transmission and emission spectra of the exoplanet. This effect can be exacerbated when combining data from different epochs if the stellar…

A new method for determining the stellar rotation period is proposed here, based on the detection of starspots during transits of an extra-solar planet orbiting its host star. As the planet eclipses the star, it may pass in front of a…

We present and discuss a polarimetric effect caused by a planet transiting the stellar disk thus breaking the symmetry of the light distribution and resulting in linear polarization of the partially eclipsed star. Estimates of this effect…

We present models designed to quantify the effects of stellar activity on exoplanet transit spectroscopy and atmospheric characterization at low (R = 100) and high (R = 100,000) spectral resolution. We study three model classes mirroring…

In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…

Doppler imaging spectroscopy is the most reliable way to directly measure wind speeds of planetary atmospheres of the Solar system. However, most knowledge about atmospheric dynamics has been obtained with cloud-tracking technique, which…