Related papers: Reconstruction of the transit signal in the presen…
Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while…
The detection and characterization of the first transiting super-Earth, CoRoT-7 b, has required an unprecedented effort in terms of telescope time and analysis. Although the star does display a radial velocity signal at the period of the…
[ABRIDGED] Since the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planet, transit timing has been recognized as a powerful method to discover and characterize additional planets in these systems. However, the gravitational influence of…
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…
Transmission spectra are differential measurements that utilize stellar illumination to probe transiting exoplanet atmospheres. Any spectral difference between the illuminating light source and the disk-integrated stellar spectrum due to…
In the effort to characterize the masses, radii, and atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets, there is an urgent need to find examples of such planets transiting nearby M dwarfs. The MEarth Project is an ongoing effort to do so, as…
Transit timing variations (TTVs) of exoplanets are normally interpreted as the consequence of gravitational interaction with additional bodies in the system. However, TTVs can also be caused by deformations of the system transits by…
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 investigate the effect of planetary rotation on the transit spectrum of an extrasolar giant planet. During ingress and egress, absorption features arising from the planet's atmosphere are Doppler shifted by of order the planet's…
The probability that an existing planetary transit is detectable in one's data is sensitively dependent upon the window function of the observations. We quantitatively characterize and provide visualizations of the dependence of this…
The ability to observe extrasolar planets transiting their stars has profoundly changed our understanding of these planetary systems. However, these measurements depend on how well we understand the properties of the host star, such as…
CoRoT-2, the second planet-hosting star discovered by the CoRoT satellite, is a young and active star. A total of 77 transits were observed for this system over a period of 135 days. Small modulations detected in the optical light curve of…
The recent discovery of a planetary transit in the star HD 209458, and the subsequent highly precise observation of the transit lightcurve with Hubble Space Telescope, is encouraging to search for any phenomena that might induce small…
The transit timing variation technique (TTV) has been widely used to detect and characterize multiple planetary systems. Due to the observational biases imposed mainly by the photometric conditions and instrumentation and the high…
Stellar magnetic activity is a source of noise in the study of the transits of extrasolar planets. It induces flux variations which affect significantly the transit depth determination and the derivations of planetary and stellar…
The Doppler effect is commonly used to infer the velocity difference between stars based on the relative shifts in the rest-frame wavelengths of their spectral features. In dynamically-cold systems with a low velocity dispersion, such as…
Tidal interactions are one of the primary drivers of orbital evolution for massive planets with short orbital periods. Tidal dissipation within host stars can cause the orbits of such planets to decay. However, the mechanisms of tidal…
Transit photometry is perhaps the most successful method for detecting exoplanets to date. However, a substantial amount of signal processing is needed since the dip in the signal detected, an indication that there is a planet in transit,…
It is shown herein that planets with eccentric orbits are more likely to transit than circularly orbiting planets with the same semimajor axis by a factor of (1-e^2)^{-1}. If the orbital parameters of discovered transiting planets are…
Context. Transit detection algorithms are mathematical tools used for detecting planets in the photometric data of transit surveys. In this work we study their application to space-based surveys. Aims: Space missions are exploring the…