Related papers: Characterizing Long-Period Transiting Planets Obse…
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…
An analysis of the currently known exoplanets in the habitable zones (HZs) of their host stars is of interest in both the wake of the NASA Kepler mission and with prospects for expanding the known planet population through future ground-…
We describe a new metric that uses machine learning to determine if a periodic signal found in a photometric time series appears to be shaped like the signature of a transiting exoplanet. This metric uses dimensionality reduction and…
Some theories of planet formation and evolution predict that intermediate-mass stars host more hot Jupiters than Sun-like stars, others reach the conclusion that such objects are very rare. By determining the frequencies of those planets we…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will photometrically monitor approximately 1 billion stars for ten years. The resulting light curves can be used to detect transiting exoplanets. In particular, as demonstrated by Lund et al.…
A number of planet-host stars have been observed to rotate with a period equal to an integer multiple of the orbital period of their close planet. We expand this list by analyzing Kepler data of HAT-P-11 and finding a period ratio of 6:1.…
Transiting extrasolar planets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation of planets as well as their internal structure. The existence of a secondary eclipse enables further study of the thermal properties of the the planet by…
Many short-period binary stars have distant orbiting companions that have played a role in driving the binary components into close separation. Indirect detection of a tertiary star is possible by measuring apparent changes in eclipse times…
Duration and period of transits in extrasolar planetary systems can exhibit long-term variations for a variety of reasons. Here we investigate how systemic proper motion, which steadily re-orients planetary orbit with respect to our line of…
We carry out an independent search of Kepler photometry for small transiting planets with sizes 0.5--8.0 times that of Earth and orbital periods between 5 and 50 days, with the goal of measuring the fraction of stars harboring such planets.…
We present a study of the relative sizes of planets within the multiple candidate systems discovered with the $Kepler$ mission. We have compared the size of each planet to the size of every other planet within a given planetary system after…
Stellar activity features such as spots can create complications in determining planetary parameters through spectroscopic and photometric observations. The overlap of a transiting planet and a stellar spot, for instance, can produce…
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered thousands of planetary systems, ~20% of which are found to host multiple transiting planets. This relative paucity (compared to the high fraction of single transiting systems) is postulated to result…
NASA's Kepler Mission uses transit photometry to determine the frequency of earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. The mission reached a milestone toward meeting that goal: the discovery of its first rocky…
We present a method to confirm the planetary nature of objects in systems with multiple transiting exoplanet candidates. This method involves a Fourier-Domain analysis of the deviations in the transit times from a constant period that…
Kepler-9 was the first case where transit timing variations have been used to confirm the planets in this system. Following predictions of dramatic TTVs - larger than a week - we re-analyse the system based on the full Kepler data set. We…
We report on the masses, sizes, and orbits of the planets orbiting 22 Kepler stars. There are 49 planet candidates around these stars, including 42 detected through transits and 7 revealed by precise Doppler measurements of the host stars.…
A planet's orbital orientation relative to an observer's line of sight determines the chord length for a transiting planet, i.e., the projected distance a transiting planet travels across the stellar disc. For a given circular orbit, the…
We analyze a sample of multiple-exoplanet systems which contain at least 3 transiting planets detected by the Kepler mission ("Kepler multiples"). We use a generalized Titius-Bode relation to predict the periods of 228 additional planets in…
Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) can provide useful information on compact multi-planetary systems observed by transits, by putting constraints on the masses and eccentricities of the observed planets. This is especially helpful when the…