Related papers: The Kepler Pixel Response Function
Understanding the distribution and occurrence rate of small planets was a fundamental goal of the Kepler transiting exoplanet mission, and could be improved with K2 and TESS. Deriving accurate exoplanetary radii requires accurate…
In the last decade, over a million stars were monitored to detect transiting planets. Manual interpretation of potential exoplanet candidates is labor intensive and subject to human error, the results of which are difficult to quantify.…
The optical, full-phase photometric variations of a short-period planet provide a unique view of the planet's atmospheric composition and dynamics. The number of planets with optical phase curve detections, however, is currently too small…
We present a new technique based on fixed-delay interferometry for high throughput, high precision and multi-object Doppler radial velocity (RV) surveys for extra-solar planets. The Doppler measurements are conducted through monitoring the…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…
Imaging with a layered superlens is a spatial filtering operation characterized by the point spread function (PSF). We show that in the same optical system the image of a narrow sub-wavelength Gaussian incident field may be surprisingly…
With the unprecedented photometric precision of the Kepler Spacecraft, significant systematic and stochastic errors on transit signal levels are observable in the Kepler photometric data. These errors, which include discontinuities,…
Point spread function (PSF) reconstruction (PSF-R) is a well established technique to determine reliably and accurately the PSF from Adaptive Optics (AO) control loop data. We have successfully applied this technique to improve the…
In photometry, the short-timescale stellar variability ("flicker"), such as that caused by granulation and oscillations, can reach amplitudes comparable to the transit depth of Earth-sized planets and is correlated over the typical transit…
We provide a preliminary estimate of the performance of reflex astrometry on Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. In Monte Carlo experiments, we analyze large samples of astrometric data sets with low to moderate…
Kepler provides light curves of 156,000 stars with unprecedented precision. However, the raw data as they come from the spacecraft contain significant systematic and stochastic errors. These errors, which include discontinuities, systematic…
Variability in the time series brightness of a star on a timescale of 8 hours, known as 'flicker', has been previously demonstrated to serve as a proxy for the surface gravity of a star by Bastien et al. (2013). Although surface gravity is…
The Kepler space mission is devoted to finding Earth-size planets in habitable zones orbiting other stars. Its large, 105-deg field-of-view features over 156,000 stars that are observed continuously to detect and characterize planet…
This paper presents GPFC, a novel Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) Phase Folding and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) system to detect exoplanets using the transit method. We devise a fast folding algorithm parallelized on a GPU to amplify…
We present results of numerical simulations of the flux (irradiance), F, and the degree of polarization (i.e. the ratio of polarized to total flux), P, of light that is reflected by Earth-like extrasolar planets orbiting solar-type stars,…
Exoplanet orbital eccentricities offer valuable clues about the history of planetary systems. Eccentric, Jupiter-sized planets are particularly interesting: they may link the "cold" Jupiters beyond the ice line to close-in hot Jupiters,…
We provide an overview of stellar variability in the first quarter of data from the Kepler mission. The intent of this paper is to examine the entire sample of over 150,000 target stars for periodic behavior in their lightcurves, and relate…
This white paper discusses a repurposed mission for the Kepler spacecraft that focusses on solving outstanding problems in planet formation and evolution by targeting the study of the hot Jupiter population of young stars. This mission can…
Time-series transit photometry from the Kepler space telescope has allowed for the discovery of thousands of exoplanets. We explore the potential of yet improved future missions such as PLATO 2.0 in detecting solar system analogues. We use…
Starting with just the assumption of uniformly distributed orbital orientations, we derive expressions for the distributions of the Keplerian orbital elements as functions of arbitrary distributions of eccentricity and semi-major axis. We…