Related papers: Astrometric Detection of Earthlike Planets
The SIM Lite mission will undertake several planet surveys. One of them, the Deep Planet Survey, is designed to detect Earth-mass exoplanets in the habitable zones of nearby main sequence stars. A double blind study has been conducted to…
With planets orbiting stars, a planetary mass function should not be seen as a low-mass extension of the stellar mass function, but a proper formalism needs to take care of the fact that the statistical properties of planet populations are…
The detection and characterization of Earth-like planet is approaching rapidly thanks to radial velocity surveys (HARPS), transit searches (Corot, Kepler) and space observatories dedicated to their characterization are already in…
[abridged] WFIRST is uniquely capable of finding planets with masses as small as Mars at separations comparable to Jupiter, i.e., beyond the current ice lines of their stars. These planets fall between the close-in planets found by Kepler…
The detection of exoplanets orbiting other stars has revolutionized our view of the cosmos. First results suggest that it is teeming with a fascinating diversity of rocky planets, including those in the habitable zone. Even our closest…
Direct imaging of exoplanetary systems is a powerful technique that can reveal Jupiter-like planets in wide orbits, can enable detailed characterization of planetary atmospheres, and is a key step towards imaging Earth-like planets. Imaging…
The search for a habitable extrasolar planet has long interested scientists, but only recently have the tools become available to search for such planets. In the past decades, the number of known extrasolar planets has ballooned into the…
The upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) means that we will soon have the capability to characterize the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets. However, it is still unknown whether such planets orbiting close to M dwarf stars…
The search for Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars and the evaluation of their occurrence rate is a major topic of research for the exoplanetary community. Two key characteristics in defining a planet as 'Earth-like' are having a…
For the first time in human history the possibility of detecting and studying Earth-like planets is on the horizon. Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF), with a launch date in the 2015 timeframe, is being planned by NASA to find and characterize…
Searching for extrasolar planets by direct detection is extremely challenging for current instrumentation. Indirect methods, that measure the effect of a planet on its host star, are much more promising and have indeed led to the discovery…
Microlensing is proving to be one of the best techniques to detect distant, low-mass planets around the most common stars in the Galaxy. In principle, Earth's microlensing signal could offer the chance for other technological civilisations…
The MPF mission will provide a statistical census of exoplanets with masses greater than 0.1 Earth-masses and orbital separations ranging from 0.5AU to infinity. This includes analogs to all the Solar System's planets except for Mercury, as…
High contrast imaging can find and characterize gas giant planets around nearby young stars and the closest M stars, complementing radial velocity and astrometric searches by exploring orbital separations inaccessible to indirect methods.…
Today's most detailed characterization of exoplanet atmospheres is accessible via transit spectroscopy (TS). Detecting transiting exoplanets only yields their size, and it is thus standard to measure a planet's mass before moving towards…
Microarcsecond (uas) astrometry is an indispensable technique to detect earth-like exoplanets, fully characterize exoplanetary orbits, and measure their masses --information critical for assessing their habitability. Highly accurate…
With the wealth of planets that have been discovered over the past $\sim$ 20 years, the field can broadly be divided into two regimes. For understanding broad occurrence and formation rates, large numbers of planets allow for population…
We present a novel method for direct detection and characterization of exoplanets from space. This method uses four collecting telescopes, combined with phase chopping and a spectrometer, with observations on only a few baselines rather…
The extraordinary astrometric accuracy of radio interferometry creates an important and unique opportunity for the discovery and characterization of exo-planets. Currently, the Very Long Baseline Array can routinely achieve better than 100…
In addition to constructing a Galactic matter mass function free from the bias induced by the hydrogen-burning limit, gravitational microlensing allows one to construct a mass function which is less affected by the problem of unresolved…