Related papers: Detecting Transits in Sparsely Sampled Surveys
We demonstrate that gravitational lensing can be used to discover and study planets in the habitable zones of nearby dwarf stars. If appropriate software is developed, a new generation of monitoring programs will automatically conduct a…
In searches for planetary transits in the field, well over half of the survey stars are typically giants or other stars that are too large to permit straightforward detection of planets. For all-sky searches of bright V<~11 stars, the…
Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in…
Transiting extrasolar planets are now discovered jointly by photometric surveys and by radial velocimetry. We want to determine whether the different data sets are compatible between themselves and with models of the evolution of extrasolar…
Small planets are common around late-M dwarfs and can be detected through highly precise photometry by the transit method. Planets orbiting nearby stars are particularly important as they are often the best-suited for future follow-up…
Transiting extrasolar planets constitute only a small fraction of the range of stellar systems found to display periodic, shallow dimmings in wide-field surveys employing small-aperture camera arrays. Here we present an efficient selection…
We present a new method for differentiating between planetary transits and eclipsing binaries based on the presence of the ellipsoidal light variations. These variations can be used to detect stellar secondaries with masses ~0.2 M_sun…
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…
Transit search programs such as CoRoT and Kepler now have the capability of detecting planets as small as the Earth. The detection of these planets however requires the removal of all false positives. Although many false positives can be…
Many ground-based photometric surveys are now under way, and five of them have been successful at detecting transiting exoplanets. Nevertheless, detecting transiting planets has turned out to be much more challenging than initially…
Transit observations have found the majority of exoplanets to date. Spectroscopic observations of transits and eclipses are the most commonly used tool to characterize exoplanet atmospheres and will be used in the search for life. However,…
Given the tendency of planets to form in multiples, and the observational evidence in support of the existence of potential planet-hosting stars in binaries or clusters, it is expected that extrasolar terrestrial planes are more likely to…
If planetary systems are ubiquitous then a fraction of stars should possess a transiting planet when being microlensed. This paper presents a study of the influence of such planets on microlensing light curves. For the giant planets…
Observing extrasolar planetary transits is one of the only ways that we may infer the masses and radii of planets outside the Solar System. As such, the detections made by photometric transit surveys are one of the only foreseeable ways…
Due to their small radii, M-dwarfs are very promising targets to search for transiting super-Earths, with a planet of 2 Earth radii orbiting an M5 dwarf in the habitable zone giving rise to a 0.5% photometric signal, with a period of two…
Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, those most adequate for life to begin and evolve have been sought. Due to observational bias, however, most of the discovered planets so far are gas giants, precluding their habitability.…
In a transiting planetary system, the presence of a second planet will cause the time interval between transits to vary. These transit timing variations (TTV) are particularly large near mean-motion resonances and can be used to infer the…
We present a fast and efficient hybrid algorithm for selecting exoplanetary candidates from wide-field transit surveys. Our method is based on the widely-used SysRem and Box Least-Squares (BLS) algorithms. Patterns of systematic error that…
The primary difficulty with using transits to discover extrasolar planets is the low probability a planet has of transiting its parent star. One way of overcoming this difficulty is to search for transits in dense stellar fields, such as…
We present a combined analysis of all publicly available, visible HST observations of transits of the planet HD 209458b. We derive the times of transit, planet radius, inclination, period, and ephemeris. The transit times are then used to…