Related papers: RISE: a fast-readout imager for exoplanet transit …

Homogeneous observations and careful analysis of transit light curves can lead to the identification of transit timing variations (TTVs). TrES-2 is one of few exoplanets, which offer the matchless possibility to combine long-term…

Of the approximately 350 extrasolar planets currently known, of order 10% orbit evolved stars with radii R >~ 2.5 R_sun. These planets are of particular interest because they tend to orbit more massive hosts, and have been subjected to…

We report the results of a prototype photometric search for transiting extrasolar planets using Subaru Suprime-Cam. Out of about 100,000 stars monitored around the Galactic plane (l=90 degree,b=0 degree), we find that 7,700 (27,000) stars…

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will conduct a 2-year long wide-field survey searching for transiting planets around bright stars. Many TESS discoveries will be amenable to mass characterization via ground-based radial velocity…

In this PhD dissertation, I discuss issues of the Radial Velocities (RV) and transit methods. These techniques allow us to derive the mass and radius of an exoplanet, necessary to model its bulk structure and to have insight on its…

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is conducting a two-year wide-field survey searching for transiting exoplanets around nearby bright stars that will be ideal for follow-up characterization. To facilitate studies of planet…

A space telescope capable of high-contrast imaging has been recognized as the avenue toward finding terrestrial planets around nearby Sun-like stars and characterizing their potential habitability. It is thus essential to quantify the…

The transit method of exoplanet discovery and characterization has enabled numerous breakthroughs in exoplanetary science. These include measurements of planetary radii, mass-radius relationships, stellar obliquities, bulk density…

Thousands of transiting exoplanets have already been detected orbiting a wide range of host stars, including the first planets that could potentially be similar to Earth. The upcoming Extremely Large Telescopes and the James Webb Space…

Observations from near the Eureka station on Ellesmere Island, in the Canadian High Arctic at 80 degrees North, benefit from 24-hour darkness combined with dark skies and long cloud-free periods during the winter. Our first astronomical…

We propose a MIDEX-class space mission with the goal to find and characterize roughly 10,000 transiting planets. When transits occur, a much more detailed characterization of the planet is possible and so a large data base of transiting…

We present RIz photometry of four consecutive transits of the newly discovered exoplanet XO-1b. We improve upon the estimates of the transit parameters, finding the planetary radius to be R_P = 1.184 +0.028/-0.018 R_Jupiter and the stellar…

Ground-based telescopes coupled with adaptive optics (AO) have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the…

Radial-velocity follow-up of stars harbouring transiting planets detected by TESS is expected to require very large amounts of expensive telescope time in the next few years. Therefore, scheduling strategies should be implemented to…

The great success of the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has shown that X-ray timing is an excellent tool for the study of strong gravitational fields and the measurement of fundamental physical properties of black holes and neutron…

The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…

[Abridged] Recently, there have been a series of detections of molecules in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets using high spectral resolution (R~100,000) observations, mostly using the CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle…

We aim to investigate variations in the arrival time of coherent stellar pulsations due to the light-travel time effect to test for the presence of sub-stellar companions. Those companions are the key to one possible formation scenario of…

The next generation of exoplanet space photometry missions proposed by both NASA and ESA promise to discover small transiting planets around the nearest and brightest main-sequence stars. The physical and rotational properties of these…

The planetary infrared excess (PIE) technique has the potential to efficiently detect and characterize the thermal spectra of both transiting and non-transiting exoplanets. However, the technique has not been evaluated on multiplanet…