Related papers: Transit Probabilities for Stars With Stellar Incli…
The presence of stellar companions around planet hosting stars influences the architecture of their planetary systems. To find and characterise these companions and determine their orbits is thus an important consideration to understand…
Almost half of the stellar systems in the solar neighborhood are made up of multiple stars. In multiple-star systems, planet formation is under the dynamical influence of stellar companions, and the planet occurrence rate is expected to be…
Planetary transits provide a unique opportunity to investigate the surface distributions of star spots. Our aim is to determine if, with continuous observation (such as the data that will be provided by the Kepler mission), we can in…
The initial task that confronted extrasolar-planet transit surveys was to monitor enough stars with sufficient photometric precision and complete phase coverage. Numerous searches have been pursued over the last few years. Among these…
Open clusters potentially provide an ideal environment for the search for transiting extrasolar planets since they feature a relatively large number of stars of the same known age and metallicity at the same distance. With this motivation,…
Observational constraints on planet spin-axis has recently become possible, and revealed a system that favors a large spin-axis misalignment, a low stellar spin-orbit misalignment and a high eccentricity. To explain the origin of such…
While not detected yet, pairs of exoplanets in the 1:1 mean motion resonance probably exist. Low eccentricity, near-planar orbits, which in the comoving frame follow the horseshoe trajectories, are one of the possible stable configurations.…
The migration and encounter histories of the giant planets in our Solar System can be constrained by the obliquities of Jupiter and Saturn. We have performed secular simulations with imposed migration and N-body simulations with…
Most Sun-like and higher-mass stars reside in systems that include one or more gravitationally bound stellar companions. These systems offer an important probe of planet formation in the most common stellar systems, while also providing key…
Stars and their exoplanets evolve together. Depending on the physical characteristics of these systems, such as age, orbital distance and activity of the host stars, certain types of star-exoplanet interactions can dominate during given…
We present a detection criterion for exo-planets to be used with the space mission COROT. This criterion is based on the transit method, which suggests the observation of star dimming caused by partial occulations by planetary companions.…
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…
A new method for determining the stellar rotation period is proposed here, based on the detection of starspots during transits of an extra-solar planet orbiting its host star. As the planet eclipses the star, it may pass in front of a…
Motivated by the large number of compact extrasolar planetary systems discovered by the Kepler Mission, this paper considers perturbations due to possible additional outer planets. The discovered compact systems sometimes contain multiple…
The radius of an exoplanet may be affected by various factors, including irradiation, planet mass and heavy element content. A significant number of transiting exoplanets have now been discovered for which the mass, radius, semi-major axis,…
When an extrasolar planet passes in front of its star (transits), its radius can be measured from the decrease in starlight and its orbital period from the time between transits. Multiple planets transiting the same star reveal more: period…
Many exoplanets are discovered in binary star systems in internal or in circumbinary orbits. Whether the planet can be habitable or not depends on the possibility to maintain liquid water on its surface, and therefore on the luminosity of…
We present an efficient analytical method to predict the maximum transit timing variations of a circumbinary exoplanet, given some basic parameters of the host binary. We derive an analytical model giving limits on the potential location of…
High contrast imaging searches for exoplanets have been conducted on 2.4-10 m telescopes, typically at H band (1.6 microns) and used exposure times of ~1 hr to search for planets with semi-major axes of > ~10 AU. We are beginning to plan…
The ease of interstellar rocket travel is an issue with implications for the long term fate of our own and other civilizations and for the much-debated number of technological civilizations in the Galaxy. We show that the physical barrier…