Related papers: Reconstruction of the transit signal in the presen…
Short-period exoplanets may exhibit orbital precession driven by several different processes, including tidal interactions with their host stars and secular interactions with additional planets. This motion manifests as periodic shifts in…
The search for extrasolar planets is strongly motivated by the goal of characterizing how frequent habitable worlds and life may be within the Galaxy. Whilst much effort has been spent on searching for Earth-like planets, large moons may…
Observations of stellar surfaces - except for the Sun - are hampered by their tiny angular extent, while observed spectral lines are smeared by averaging over the stellar surface, and by stellar rotation. Exoplanet transits can be used to…
Context: Rocky planets on ultra-short period orbits can have surface magma oceans and rock-vapour atmospheres in which dust can condense. Observations of that dust can inform about the composition surface conditions on these objects. Aims:…
With each new version of the Kepler pipeline and resulting planet candidate catalogue, an updated measurement of the underlying planet population can only be recovered with an corresponding measurement of the Kepler pipeline detection…
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…
Exoplanetary science heavily relies on transit depth ($D$) measurements. Yet, as instrumental precision increases, the uncertainty on $D$ appears to increasingly drift from expectations driven solely by photon-noise. Here we characterize…
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…
Kepler will monitor a sufficient number of stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the exquisite Kepler photometry of such transits with precise…
The Kepler planet sample can only be used to reconstruct the underlying planet occurrence rate if the detection efficiency of the Kepler pipeline is known, here we present the results of a second experiment aimed at characterising this…
Modern theoretical estimates show that with the help of real equipment we are able to detect large satellites of exoplanets (about the size of the Ganymede), although, numerical attempts of direct exomoon detection were unsuccessful. Lots…
The yields from transit surveys can be used to constrain the frequency and statistical properties of extrasolar planets. Conversely, planet frequencies can be used to estimate expected detection rates, which are critical for the planning…
As a planet transits the face of a star, it accelerates along the line-of-sight. The changing delay in the propagation of photons produces an apparent deceleration of the planet across the sky throughout the transit. This persistent…
Planetary transits are commonly observed at visible wavelengths. Here we investigate the shape of a planetary transit observed at radio wavelengths. Solar maps of the Sun at 17 GHz are used as a proxy for the stellar eclipse by several…
CoRoT-7 is an 11th magnitude K-star whose light curve shows transits with depth of 0.3 mmag and a period of 0.854 d, superimposed on variability at the 1% level, due to the modulation of evolving active regions with the star's 23 d rotation…
Nearly everything we know about extrasolar planets to date comes from optical astronomy. While exoplanetary aurorae are predicted to be bright at low radio frequencies (< 1 GHz), we consider the effect of an exoplanet transit on radio…
Transmission spectroscopy during planetary transits, which is based on the measurements of the variations of planet-to-star radius ratio as a function of wavelength, is a powerful technique to study the atmospheric properties of transiting…
It is known that the shape of a planet (oblateness, rings, etc.) slightly modifies the shape of the transit light curve. The forthcoming space missions (Corot, Kepler), able to detect the transit of Earth-like planets, could a fortiori also…
We describe a project (transitsearch.org) currently attempting to discover transiting intermediate-period planets orbiting bright parent stars, and we simulate that project's performance. The discovery of such a transit would be an…
Transit timing variations (TTVs) can provide useful information for systems observed by transit, as they allow us to put constraints on the masses and eccentricities of the observed planets, or even to constrain the existence of…