Related papers: The Impact of Transit Observations on Planetary Ph…

Atmospheric tides can have a strong impact on the rotational dynamics of planets. They are of most importance for terrestrial planets located in the habitable zone of their host star, where their competition with solid tides is likely to…

Within the next five years, a number of direct-imaging planet search instruments, like the VLT SPHERE instrument, will be coming online. To successfully carry out their programs, these instruments will rely heavily on a-priori information…

Although current sensitivity limits are such that true Solar System analogs remain challenging to detect, numerous planetary systems have been discovered that are very different from our own Solar System. The majority of systems harbor a…

Transmission spectra contain a wealth of information about the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets. However, large thermal and chemical gradients along the line of sight can lead to biased inferences in atmospheric retrievals. In order to…

Among other things, studies of the formation and evolution of planetary systems currently draw on two important observational resources: the precise characterization available for planets that transit their parent stars and the frequency…

The temperature of an atmosphere decreases with increasing altitude, unless a shortwave absorber exists that causes a temperature inversion. Ozone plays this role in the Earth`s atmosphere. In the atmospheres of highly irradiated…

The probability of the detection of Earth-like exoplanets may increase in the near future after the launch of the space missions using the transit photometry as observation method. By using this technique only the semi-major axis of the…

The timing and duration of exoplanet transits has a dependency on observer position due to parallax. In the case of an Earth-bound observer with a 2 AU baseline the dependency is typically small and slightly beyond the limits of current…

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…

Studying the atmospheres of exoplanets is one of the most promising ways to learn about distant worlds beyond our solar system. The composition of an exoplanet's atmosphere can provide critical insights into its geology and potential…

When an extrasolar planet passes in front of its star (transits), its radius can be measured from the decrease in starlight and its orbital period from the time between transits. Multiple planets transiting the same star reveal more: period…

Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, those most adequate for life to begin and evolve have been sought. Due to observational bias, however, most of the discovered planets so far are gas giants, precluding their habitability.…

Close-in giant planets with strong stellar irradiation show atmospheric circulation patterns with strong equatorial jets and global-scale stationary waves. So far, almost all modeling works on atmospheric circulations of such giant planets…

We quantify the effects of refraction in transit transmission spectroscopy on spectral absorption features and on temporal variations that could be used to obtain altitude-dependent spectra for planets orbiting stars of different stellar…

We point out an intriguing relation between the masses of the transiting planets and their orbital periods. For the six currently known transiting planets, the data are consistent with a decreasing linear relation. The other known…

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…

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 atmospheres of exoplanets reveal all their properties beyond mass, radius, and orbit. Based on bulk densities, we know that exoplanets larger than 1.5 Earth radii must have gaseous envelopes, hence atmospheres. We discuss contemporary…

We consider the thermal structure and radii of strongly irradiated gas giant planets over a range in mass and irradiating flux. The cooling rate of the planet is sensitive to the surface boundary condition, which depends on the detailed…

Water is fundamental to our understanding of the evolution of planetary systems and the delivery of volatiles to the surfaces of potentially habitable planets. Yet, we currently have essentially no facilities capable of observing this key…