Related papers: Detecting transits from Earth-sized planets around…
We investigate the planetary transit detectability in the presence of stellar rotational activity from light curves for young M-dwarfs and estimate improvements of the detection at near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths. Making maps of the transit…
CoRoT-7b, the first super-Earth with measured radius discovered, has opened the new field of rocky exoplanets characterisation. To better understand this interesting system, new observations were taken with the CoRoT satellite. During this…
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…
Context: CoRoT is a pioneering space mission devoted to the analysis of stellar variability and the photometric detection of extrasolar planets. Aims: We present the list of planetary transit candidates detected in the first field observed…
Transit and radial velocity searches are two techniques for identifying nearby extrasolar planets to Earth that transit bright stars. Identifying a robust sample of these exoplanets around bright stars for detailed atmospheric…
From simulations of transit observations, it is found that the detectability of extrasolar planets depends only on two parameters: The signal-to-noise ratio during a transit, and the number of data points observed during transits. All other…
We analyze variations in the transit lightcurves of CoRoT-2b, a massive hot Jupiter orbiting a highly active G star. We use one transit lightcurve to eclipse-map a photospheric spot occulted by the planet. In this case study we determine…
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Kepler space mission observed a large number of planetary transits showing anomalies due to starspot eclipses, with more such observations expected in the near future by the K2 mission and the…
The XO project aims at detecting transiting exoplanets around bright stars from the ground using small telescopes. The original configuration of XO (McCullough et al. 2005) has been changed and extended as described here. The instrumental…
The transit method, during which a planet's presence is inferred by measuring the reduction in flux as it passes in front of its parent star, is a highly successful exoplanet detection and characterization technique. During transit, the…
Each transiting planet discovered is characterized by 7 measurable quantities, that may or may not be linked together (planet mass, radius, orbital period, and star mass, radius, effective temperature, and metallicity). Correlations between…
Small planets are common around late-M dwarfs and can be detected through highly precise photometry by the transit method. Planets orbiting nearby stars are particularly important as they are often the best-suited for future follow-up…
An overview is given of the Permanent All Sky Survey (PASS) project. The primary goal of PASS is the detection of all transiting giant planets in the entire sky, complete for stellar systems of magnitudes ~ 5.5-10.5. Since the sample stars…
A promising method to detect earth-sized exoplanets is the timing analysis of a known transit. The technique allows a search for variations in transit duration or center induced by the perturbation of a third body, e.g. a second planet or…
Ground based radial velocity (RV) searches continue to discover exoplanets below Neptune mass down to Earth mass. Furthermore, ground based transit searches now reach milli-mag photometric precision and can discover Neptune size planets…
Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in…
By targeting nearby M dwarfs, a transit search using modest equipment is capable of discovering planets as small as 2 Earth radii in the habitable zones of their host stars. The MEarth Project, a future transit search, aims to employ a…
In a transiting planetary system, the presence of a second planet will cause the time interval between transits to vary. These transit timing variations (TTV) are particularly large near mean-motion resonances and can be used to infer the…
Aims: We compare the apparent difference in timing of transiting planets (or eclipsing binaries) that are observed from widely separated locations (parallactic delay). Methods: A simple geometrical argument allow us to show that the…
Transiting planet discoveries have yielded a plethora of information regarding the internal structure and atmospheres of extra-solar planets. These discoveries have been restricted to the low-periastron distance regime due to the bias…