Related papers: Radii of Rapidly-Rotating Stars, with Application …
We have derived masses and radii for both components in five short-period single-lined eclipsing binary stars discovered by the TrES wide-angle photometric survey for transiting planets. All these systems consist of a visible F-star primary…
The ability to make accurate determinations of planetary parameters is inextricably linked to measuring physical parameters of the host star, in particular the stellar radius. In this paper we fit the stellar spectral energy distributions…
The aim of this paper is to determinate the fundamental parameters of six exoplanet host (EH) stars and their planets. While techniques for detecting exoplanets yield properties of the planet only as a function of the properties of the host…
In this PhD dissertation, I discuss issues of the Radial Velocities (RV) and transit methods. These techniques allow us to derive the mass and radius of an exoplanet, necessary to model its bulk structure and to have insight on its…
The masses and radii of extrasolar planets are key observables for understanding their interior, formation and evolution. While transit photometry and Doppler spectroscopy are used to measure the radii and masses respectively of planets…
Numerous investigations on the fundamental properties of low-mass stars using eclipsing binaries indicate a strong discrepancy between theory and observations that is still awaiting explanation. Current models seem to predict radii for…
Precise and reliable measurements of the masses and radii of neutron stars with a variety of masses would provide valuable guidance for improving models of the properties of cold matter with densities above the saturation density of nuclear…
Future generations of precise radial velocity (RV) surveys aim to achieve sensitivity sufficient to detect Earth mass planets orbiting in their stars' habitable zones. A major obstacle to this goal is astrophysical radial velocity noise…
The recent burst in the number of radii measurements of very low-mass stars from eclipsing binaries and interferometry of single stars has opened more questions about what can be causing the discrepancy between the observed radii and the…
Some aspects of the systematic and statistical errors affecting grid-based estimation of stellar masses and radii have still not been investigated well. We study the impact on mass and radius determination of the uncertainty in the input…
The precise measurement of the masses and radii of stars in eclipsing binary systems provides a window into uncertain processes in stellar evolution, especially mixing at convective boundaries. Recently, these data have been used to…
We perform a systematic analysis of neutron star radius constraints from five quiescent low-mass X-ray binaries and examine how they depend on measurements of their distances and amounts of intervening absorbing material, as well as their…
For distant stars, as observed by the NASA Kepler satellite, parallax information is currently of fairly low quality and is not complete. This limits the precision with which the absolute sizes of the stars and their potential transiting…
Active, low-mass stars are widely observed to have radii that are larger than predicted by standard stellar models. Proposed mechanisms for this radius inflation generally involve stellar magnetism, either in the form of added pressure…
Line ratios in "fir" triplets of helium-like ions have proven to be a powerful diagnostic of conditions in X-ray emitting gas surrounding massive stars. Recent observations indicate that these ratios can be variable with time. The possible…
The determination of accurate stellar parameters of giant stars is essential for our understanding of such stars in general and as exoplanet host stars in particular. Precise stellar masses are vital for determining the lower mass limit of…
The rotation periods of the host stars of extrasolar planets have been assessed against those of the Mt. Wilson stars, open cluster stars, and evolutionary stellar models that include rotation. They appear to be normal, modulo certain…
The Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) survey used transit photometry to discover nearly 200 gas-giant exoplanets and derive their planetary and stellar parameters. Reliable determination of the planetary density depends on accurate…
While stellar rotation periods $P_\mathrm{rot}$ may be measured from broadband photometry, the photometric modulation becomes harder to detect for slower rotators, which could bias measurements of the long-period tail of the…
Observational biases distort our view of nature, such that the patterns we see within a surveyed population of interest are often unrepresentative of the truth we seek. Transiting planets currently represent the most informative data set on…