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Astronomy is at times a science of unexpected discovery. When it is, and if we are lucky, new intellectual territories emerge to challenge our views of the cosmos. The recent indirect detections using high-precision Doppler spectroscopy of…
Over the past 4 decades, the exploration of planets beyond our solar system has yielded the discovery of over 5600 exoplanets orbiting different stars. Continuous advancements in instrumentation and cutting-edge techniques empower…
In the past four decades a new type of astronomy has emerged, where instead of looking up into the sky "telescopes" are buried miles underground or deep under water or ice and search not for photons (that is, light), but rather for…
IRAC excels at detecting distant objects. Due to a combination of the shapes of the spectral energy distributions of galaxies and the low background achieved from space, IRAC reaches greater depth in comparable exposure time at 3.6 and 4.5…
Gaia is a satellite mission of the European Space Agency which is creating a catalogue of extremely accurate positions, distances and space motions of two billion stars in our Galaxy, along with more than one hundred thousand solar system…
Roughly half of Solar-type planet hosts have stellar companions, so understanding how these binary companions affect the formation and evolution of planets is an important component to understanding planetary systems overall. Measuring the…
Kepler's primary mission is a search for earth-size exoplanets in the habitable zone of late-type stars using the transit method. To effectively accomplish this mission, Kepler orbits the Sun and stares nearly continuously at one…
Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…
There are different methods for finding exoplanets such as radial spectral shifts, astrometrical measurements, transits, timing etc. Gravitational microlensing (including pixel-lensing) is among the most promising techniques with the…
Despite the revolution in our knowledge resulting from the detection of planets around mature stars, we know almost nothing about planets orbiting young stars because rapid rotation and active photospheres preclude detection by radial…
In this era of spatially resolved observations of planet forming disks with ALMA and large ground-based telescopes such as the VLT, Keck and Subaru, we still lack statistically relevant information on the quantity and composition of the…
The new generation of ground-based, large-aperture solar telescopes promises to significantly increase our capabilities to understand the many basic phenomena taking place in the Sun at all atmospheric layers and how they relate to each…
Directly imaging extrasolar planets using a monolithic optical telescope avoids many pitfalls of space interferometry and opens up the prospect of visible light studies of extrasolar planetary systems. Future astronomical missions may…
The New Horizons spacecraft will achieve a wide range of measurement objectives at the Pluto system, including color and panchromatic maps, 1.25-2.50 micron spectral images for studying surface compositions, and measurements of Pluto's…
As astronomers, we are living an exciting time for what concerns the search for other worlds. Recent discoveries have already deeply impacted our vision of planetary formation and architectures. Future bio-signature discoveries will…
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…
Exoplanet science is now in its full expansion, particularly after the CoRoT and Kepler space missions that led us to the discovery of thousands of extra-solar planets. The last decade has taught us that UV observations play a major role in…
We present data obtained with the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) aboard the Spitzer Space Telescope (Spitzer) for a sample of 74 young (t < 30 Myr old) Sun-like (0.7 < M(star)/M(Sun) < 1.5) stars. These are a sub-set of the observations that…
The Spitzer Space Telescope has three science instruments (IRAC, MIPS, and IRS) that can take images at 3.6, 4.5, 5.8, 8.0, 24, 70, and 160 microns, spectra over 5--38 microns, and spectral energy distribution over 52--100 microns. The…
We summarize the scientific potential of high contrast optical space imaging for studies of extrasolar planets, debris disks, and planet formation. The unique scientific capabilities offered by a 2-m class optical telescope, the technical…