Related papers: Methods for exomoon characterisation: combining tr…
An exoplanet-exomoon system presents a superposition of phase curves to observers - the dominant component varies according to the planetary period, and the lesser varies according to both the planetary and the lunar period. If the spectra…
Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, those most adequate for life to begin and evolve have been sought. Due to observational bias, however, most of the discovered planets so far are gas giants, precluding their habitability.…
We present two methods to determine an exomoon's sense of orbital motion (SOM), one with respect to the planet's circumstellar orbit and one with respect to the planetary rotation. Our simulations show that the required measurements will be…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect has been widely used to estimate the sky-projected spin-orbit angle, $\lambda$, of transiting planetary systems. Most of the previous analysis assume that the host stars are rigid rotators in which the…
We obtain analytical expressions for the velocity anomaly due to the Rossiter- McLaughlin effect, for the case when the anomalous radial velocity is obtained by cross-correlation with a stellar template spectrum. In the limit of vanishing…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect is a method that allows us to measure the orbital obliquity of planets, which is an important constraint that has been used to understand the formation and migration mechanisms of planets, especially for…
One of the most powerful methods used to estimate sky-projected spin-orbit angles of exoplanetary systems is through a spectroscopic transit observation known as the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect. So far mostly single RM observations have…
In this paper we introduce CaRM, a semi-automatic code for the retrieval of broadband transmission spectra of transiting planets through the chromatic Rossiter-McLaughlin method. We applied it to HARPS and ESPRESSO observations of two…
Of the 26 transiting exoplanet systems with measurements of the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect, eight have now been found to be significantly spin-orbit misaligned in the plane of the sky. Unfortunately, the RM effect only measures the…
Rapid planetary rotation can cause the equilibrium shape of a planet to be oblate. While planetary oblateness has mostly been probed by examining the subtle ingress and egress features in photometric transit light curves, we investigate the…
Transmission spectroscopy is a powerful technique for probing exoplanetary atmospheres. A successful ground-based observational method uses a differential technique based on high-dispersion spectroscopy, but that only preserves narrow…
The detectability of moons of extra-solar planets is investigated, focussing on the time-of-arrival perturbation technique, a method for detecting moons of pulsar planets, and the photometric transit timing technique, a method for detecting…
It has been previously shown that moons of extrasolar planets may be detectable with the Kepler Mission, for moon masses above ~0.2 Earth masses Kipping et al. 2009c. Transit timing effects have been formerly identified as a potent tool to…
The number of known transiting exoplanets is rapidly increasing, which has recently inspired significant interest as to whether they can host a detectable moon. Although there has been no such example where the presence of a satellite was…
Photometry with the transit method has arguably been the most successful exoplanet discovery method to date. A short overview about the rise of that method to its present status is given. The method's strength is the rich set of parameters…
Probing the trajectory of a transiting planet across the disk of its star through the analysis of its Rossiter-McLaughlin effect can be used to measure the differential rotation of the host star and the true obliquity of the system. Highly…
We report a measurement of the Rossiter--McLaughlin effect in the transiting extrasolar planetary system TrES-1, via simultaneous spectroscopic and photometric observations with the Subaru and MAGNUM telescopes. By modeling the radial…
One of the simplest ways to identify an exoplanetary transit is to phase fold a photometric time series upon a trial period - leading to a coherent stack when using the correct value. Such phase-folded transits have become a standard data…
The increasing number of transiting exoplanets sparked a significant interest in discovering their moons. Most of the methods in the literature utilize timing analysis of the raw light curves. Here we propose a new approach for the direct…
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…