Related papers: Getting More For Your Money: Identifying and Confi…

Observations of various solar-type stars along decades revealed that they can have magnetic cycles, just like our Sun. An investigation of the relation between their cycle length and rotation period can shed light on the dynamo mechanisms…

Detection and orbit determination for thousands of planets with periods up to about 40 years would be obtained by astrometry from two Gaia-like missions, results which cannot be obtained by any other mission, planned or proposed. A billion…

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…

Early time-series photometry from NASA's Kepler spacecraft has revealed a planet transiting the star we term Kepler-4, at RA = 19h02m27.68s, Dec = +50:08:08.7. The planet has an orbital period of 3.213 days and shows transits with a…

Transit (TR) surveys for extrasolar planets have recently uncovered a population of ``very hot Jupiters,'' planets with orbital periods of P< 3 d. At first sight this may seem surprising, given that radial velocity (RV) surveys have found a…

The NASA Kepler and K2 Missions have recently revealed a population of transiting giant planets orbiting moderately evolved, low-luminosity red giant branch stars. Here, we present radial velocity measurements of three of these systems,…

We report the detection of a planet whose orbit surrounds a pair of low-mass stars. Data from the Kepler spacecraft reveal transits of the planet across both stars, in addition to the mutual eclipses of the stars, giving precise constraints…

When extrasolar planets are observed to transit their parent stars, we are granted unprecedented access to their physical properties. It is only for transiting planets that we are permitted direct estimates of the planetary masses and…

We present an improved estimate of the occurrence rate of small planets orbiting small stars by searching the full four-year Kepler data set for transiting planets using our own planet detection pipeline and conducting transit injection and…

Transiting exoplanets in multi-planet systems have non-Keplerian orbits which can cause the times and durations of transits to vary. The theory and observations of transit timing variations (TTV) and transit duration variations (TDV) are…

Transiting planet discoveries have yielded a plethora of information towards understanding the structure and atmospheres of extra-solar planets. These discoveries have been restricted to the short-period or low-periastron distance regimes…

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…

Determining whether Earth-like planets are common or rare looms as a touchstone in the question of life in the universe. We searched for Earth-size planets that cross in front of their host stars by examining the brightness measurements of…

After finding more planets than expected at the shortest period, there has been an effort to explain their numbers by weak tidal friction. However, we find that the strength of tidal dissipation that would produce the occurence distribution…

Approximately half of the planets discovered by NASA's Kepler mission are in systems where just a single planet transits its host star, and the remaining planets are observed to be in multi-planet systems. Recent analyses have reported a…

We present photometry of HD 189733 during eight transits of its close-in giant planet, and out-of-transit photometry spanning two years. Using the transit photometry, we determine the stellar and planetary radii and the photometric…

We present a statistical analysis that demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Kepler candidate multiple transiting systems (multis) indeed represent true, physically-associated transiting planets. Binary stars provide the primary…

We present high precision photometry of Kepler-41, a giant planet in a 1.86 day orbit around a G6V star that was recently confirmed through radial velocity measurements. We have developed a new method to confirm giant planets solely from…

The increasing number of transiting exoplanets sparked a significant interest in discovering their moons. Most of the methods in the literature utilize timing analysis of the raw light curves. Here we propose a new approach for the direct…

We show that the Kepler spacecraft in two-reaction wheel mode of operation is very well suited for the study of eclipsing binary star systems. Continued observations of the Kepler field will provide the most enduring and long-term valuable…