Related papers: Observational Window Functions in Planet Transit S…

Aims: We compare the apparent difference in timing of transiting planets (or eclipsing binaries) that are observed from widely separated locations (parallactic delay). Methods: A simple geometrical argument allow us to show that the…

The detection of planetary transits in the light curves of active stars, featuring correlated noise in the form of stellar variability, remains a challenge. Depending on the noise characteristics, we show that the traditional technique that…

Context. The PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission will observe the same area of the sky continuously for at least two years in an effort to detect transit signals of an Earth-like planet orbiting a solar-like star.…

I present an initial investigation into a new planet detection technique that uses the transit timing of a known, transiting planet. The transits of a solitary planet orbiting a star occur at equally spaced intervals in time. If a second…

For extrasolar planets with orbital periods, P>10 days, radial velocity surveys find non-circular orbital eccentricities are common, <e>~0.3. Future surveys for extrasolar planets using the transit technique will also have sensitivity to…

Transits on single stars are rare. The probability rarely exceeds a few per cent. Furthermore, this probability rapidly approaches zero at increasing orbital period. Therefore transit surveys have been predominantly limited to the inner…

[ABRIDGED] Since the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planet, transit timing has been recognized as a powerful method to discover and characterize additional planets in these systems. However, the gravitational influence of…

Context. Detecting regular dips in the light curve of a star is an easy way to detect the presence of an orbiting planet. COROT is a Franco-European mission launched at the end of 2006, and one of its main objectives is to detect planetary…

Transiting planet discoveries have yielded a plethora of information regarding the internal structure and atmospheres of extra-solar planets. These discoveries have been restricted to the low-periastron distance regime due to the bias…

A recent study demonstrated that there is significant covariance structure in the noise on data from ground-based photometric surveys designed to detect transiting extrasolar planets. Such correlation in the noise has often been overlooked,…

Stellar magnetic activity is a source of noise in the study of the transits of extrasolar planets. It induces flux variations which affect significantly the transit depth determination and the derivations of planetary and stellar…

Transiting extrasolar planets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation of planets as well as their internal structure. The existence of a secondary eclipse enables further study of the thermal properties of the the planet by…

With the growing number of projects dedicated to the search for extrasolar planets via transits, there is a need to develop fast, automatic, robust methods with a statistical background in order to efficiently do the analysis. We propose a…

Transiting planet systems offer an unique opportunity to observationally constrain proposed models of the interiors (radius, composition) and atmospheres (chemistry, dynamics) of extrasolar planets. The spectacular successes of ground-based…

Intrinsic stellar variability can hinder the detection of shallow transits, particularly in space-based data. Therefore, this variability has to be filtered out before running the transit search. Unfortunately, filtering out the low…

This thesis focuses on the detection of extrasolar planets via the transit method, and more specifically addresses issues relevant to the preparation of upcoming space missions such as CoRoT, Kepler, Eddington, aiming to detect terrestrial…

The treatment of systematic noise is a significant aspect of transit exoplanet data processing due to the signal strength of systematic noise relative to a transit signal. Typically the standard approach to transit detection is to estimate…

We present analytic estimates of the fractional uncertainties on the mass, radius, surface gravity, and density of a transiting planet, using only empirical or semi-empirical measurements. We first express these parameters in terms of…

In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…

We present a yield simulator to predict the number and characteristics of planets, false positives and false alarms in transit surveys. The simulator is based on a galactic model and the planet occurrence rates measured by the Kepler…