Related papers: A Search for Planets with SALT

Aims: In this work, we discuss a way to combine High Dispersion Spectroscopy and High Contrast Imaging (HDS+HCI). For a planet located at a resolvable angular distance from its host star, the starlight can be reduced up to several orders of…

The hard X-ray sky now being studied by INTEGRAL and Swift and soon by NuSTAR is rich with energetic phenomena and highly variable non-thermal phenomena on a broad range of timescales. The High Energy Telescope (HET) on the proposed…

As the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) fulfills its primary mission, it is executing an unprecedented survey of almost the entire sky: TESS's approved extended mission will likely extend sky coverage to ~94%, including…

Direct imaging surveys for exoplanets commonly exclude binary stars from their target lists, leaving a large part of the overall planet demography unexplored. To address this gap in our understanding of planet formation and evolution, we…

(Abridged) We discuss the design considerations of the EXPLORE (EXtra-solar PLanet Occultation REsearch) project, a series of transiting planet searches using 4-m-class telescopes to continuously monitor a single field of stars in the…

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…

Gravitational lensing has seen a surge of interest in the past few years. The handful of strong lensing systems known in the year 2000 has now been replaced with hundreds, thanks to innovative multi-wavelength selection, and there is an…

We present improvements to the pointing accuracy of the South Pole Telescope (SPT) using machine learning. The ability of the SPT to point accurately at the sky is limited by its structural imperfections, which are impacted by the extreme…

Future radial velocity, astrometric, and direct-imaging surveys will find nearby Earth-sized planets within the habitable zone in the near future. How can we search for water and oxygen in those nontransiting planets? We show that a…

We present design considerations for a ground-based survey for transiting exoplanets around L and T dwarfs, spectral classes that have yet to be thoroughly probed for planets. We simulate photometry for L and T targets with a variety of…

The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) project is a survey for new transiting planets around bright stars. KELT-South is a small-aperture, wide-field automated telescope located at Sutherland, South Africa. The telescope surveys a…

We analyzed the combined near-infrared spectrum of a star-planet system with thermal emission atmospheric models, based on the composition and physical parameters of the system. The main objective of this work is to obtain the inclination…

Transit surveys indicate that there is a deficit of Neptune-sized planets on close-in orbits. If this ``Neptune desert' is entirely cleared out by atmospheric mass loss, then planets at its upper edge should only be marginally stable…

Remote sensing observations suffer significant limitations when used to study the bulk atmospheric composition of the giant planets of our solar system. This impacts our knowledge of the formation of these planets and the physics of their…

Exoplanet science is booming. In 20 years our knowledge has expanded considerably, from the first discovery of a Hot Jupiter, to the detection of a large population of Neptunes and super-Earths, to the first steps toward the…

The Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) survey of helium-rich hot subdwarfs aims to explore evolutionary pathways amongst groups of highly-evolved stars. The selection criteria mean that several hot white dwarfs and related objects have…

Measurements of the frequency with which short-period planets occur around main sequence stars allows a direct prediction of the number and types of such planets that will be amenable to characterization by high-contrast instruments on…

Direct imaging of exoplanets presents a formidable technical challenge owing to the small angular separation and high contrast between exoplanets and their host stars. High Dispersion Coronagraphy (HDC) is a pathway to achieve unprecedented…

Among highly irradiated exoplanets, some have been found to undergo significant hydrodynamic expansion traced by atmospheric escape. To better understand these processes in the context of planetary evolution, we propose NIGHT (the…

A unique analytical solution of planet and star parameters can be derived from an extrasolar planet transit light curve under a number of assumptions. This analytical solution can be used to choose the best planet transit candidates for…