Related papers: Blue Dots Team Transits Working Group Review
Transits of bright stars offer a unique opportunity to study detailed properties of extrasolar planets that cannot be determined through radial-velocity observations. We propose a technique to find such systems using all-sky small-aperture…
We have developed a new method to improve the transit detection of Earth-sized planets in front of solar-like stars by fitting stellar microvariability by means of a spot model. A large Monte Carlo numerical experiment has been designed to…
The Kepler Mission is monitoring the brightness of ~150,000 stars searching for evidence of planetary transits. As part of the "Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler" (HEK) project, we report a planetary system with two confirmed planets and one…
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has successfully discovered thousands of exoplanet candidates using the transit method, including hundreds of stars with multiple transiting planets. In order to estimate the frequency of these valuable…
Moderately close binaries are a special class of targets for planet searches. From a theoretical standpoint, their hospitality to giant planets is uncertain and debated. From an observational standpoint, many of these systems present…
With the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planetary system back to 1999, a great number of projects started to hunt for other similar systems. Because of the incidence rate of such systems was unknown and the length of the…
In this white paper, we assess the potential for JWST to characterize the atmospheres of super-Earth exoplanets, by simulating a range of transiting spectra with different masses and temperatures. Our results are based on a JWST simulator…
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…
The motivation, techniques and performance of the ground-based photometric follow-up of transit detections by the CoRoT space mission are presented. Its principal raison d'\^{e}tre arises from the much higher spatial resolution of common…
The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation…
Transiting exoplanets provide access to data to study the mass-radius relation and internal structure of extrasolar planets. Long-period transiting planets allow insight into planetary environments similar to the Solar System where, in…
A variety of terrestrial planets with different physical parameters and exotic atmospheres might plausibly exist outside our Solar System, waiting to be detected by the next generation of space-exploration missions. Some of these planets…
The analysis of the CoRoT space mission data was performed aiming to test a method that selects, among the several light curves observed, the transiting systems that likely host a low-mass star orbiting the main target. The method…
Various techniques are being used to search for extra-solar planetary signatures, including accurate measurement of radial velocity and positional (astrometric) displacements, gravitational microlensing, and photometric transits. Planned…
Eighty planetary systems of two or more planets are known to orbit stars other than the Sun. For most, the data can be sufficiently explained by non-interacting Keplerian orbits, so the dynamical interactions of these systems have not been…
The search for life outside of the Solar System should not be restricted to exclusively planetary bodies; large moons of extrasolar planets may also be common habitable environments throughout the Galaxy. Extrasolar moons, or exomoons, may…
We describe a project (transitsearch.org) currently attempting to discover transiting intermediate-period planets orbiting bright parent stars, and we simulate that project's performance. The discovery of such a transit would be an…
Context. Transit detection algorithms are mathematical tools used for detecting planets in the photometric data of transit surveys. In this work we study their application to space-based surveys. Aims: Space missions are exploring the…
The best-characterized exoplanets to date are planets on close-in transiting orbits around their host stars. The high level of irradiation and transiting geometry of these objects make them ideal targets for atmospheric investigations.…
We present a new algorithm for detecting transiting extrasolar planets in time-series photometry. The Quasiperiodic Automated Transit Search (QATS) algorithm relaxes the usual assumption of strictly periodic transits by permitting a…