Related papers: Asteroseismology and the Solar-Stellar Connection
We present the discovery of a super-earth-sized planet in or near the habitable zone of a sun-like star. The host is Kepler-69, a 13.7 mag G4V-type star. We detect two periodic sets of transit signals in the three-year flux time series of…
Eddington, COROT, MONS, KEPLER, and the other asteroseismology and planet finding missions, obtain extremely high photometric quality time-series data as their primary purpose. Similar quality data are potentially, and in some designs…
The NASA K2 mission that succeeded the nominal Kepler mission observed several hundreds of thousands of stars during its operations. While most of the stars were observed in single campaigns of 80 days, some of them were targeted for more…
After more than one year of operation, the Kepler photometer has already provided exquisite data of solar-type stars. During the survey phase, 42 stars have been continuously observed. It appeared that five stars show evidence of…
In its 16 years of scientific measurements, the Spitzer Space Telescope performed a number of ground breaking and key infrared measurements of Solar System objects near and far. Targets ranged from the smallest planetesimals to the giant…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
In this thesis, I explore two topics in exoplanet science. The first is the prevalence of Earth-size planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. To determine the occurrence of planets having different sizes, orbital periods, and other properties, I…
Direct detection and characterization of Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars is a core task for evaluating the prevalence of habitability and life in the Universe. Here, we discuss a promising option for achieving this goal, which is…
We propose to use a modest fraction of the re-purposed Kepler mission time and apertures to greatly increase the quantity and quality of our knowledge of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) rotation and shape. NEAs are important for understanding…
Asteroseismology has started to provide constraints on stellar properties that will be essential to accurately reconstruct the history of the Milky Way. Here we look at the information content in data sets representing current and future…
The overarching goal of planetary astronomy is to deduce how the present collection of objects found in our Solar System were formed from the original material present in the proto-solar nebula. As over two hundred exo-planetary systems are…
The Kepler Mission seeks to detect Earth-size planets transiting solar-like stars in its ~115 deg^2 field of view over the course of its 3.5 year primary mission by monitoring the brightness of each of ~156,000 Long Cadence stellar targets…
Context. The CoRoT and Kepler missions have paved the way for synergies between exoplanetology and asteroseismology. The use of seismic data helps providing stringent constraints on the stellar properties which directly impact the results…
The results of our six year systematic observational survey on candidate eclipsing binaries with a delta Sct component are briefly presented. A new catalogue for this kind of systems as well as the properties of their delta Sct members are…
Planet Hunters is a new citizen science project, designed to engage the public in an exoplanet search using NASA Kepler public release data. In the first month after launch, users identified two new planet candidates which survived our…
Asteroseismology provides fundamental properties (mass, radius and effective temperature) of solar-like oscillating stars using so-called scaling relations. These properties allow the computation of the asteroseismic distance of stars. We…
This paper investigates an autonomous navigation method for spacecraft operating in the outer solar system, up to 250 AU from the Sun, using the parallactic shifts of nearby stars. These measurements enable estimation of the spacecraft…
Exoplanets are celestial bodies orbiting stars beyond our Solar System. Although historically they posed detection challenges, Kepler's data has revolutionized our understanding. By analyzing flux values from the Kepler Mission, we…
The first public release of long-cadence stellar photometric data collected by the NASA Kepler mission has now been made available. In this paper we characterise the red-giant (G-K) stars in this large sample in terms of their solar-like…
In this paper we investigate the detectability of a habitable-zone exomoon around various configurations of exoplanetary systems with the Kepler Mission or photometry of approximately equal quality. We calculate both the predicted transit…