Related papers: Methods for exomoon characterisation: combining tr…
We report a joint analysis of the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect with Subaru and the Kepler photometry for Kepler Object of Interest (KOI) 94 system. The system comprises four transiting planet candidates with orbital periods of 22.3…
The study of meter and sub-meter scale geological features, especially boulders and boulder fields, on the surface of airless bodies can provide insight into the evolution of the regolith and the contribution of various processes to its…
In the search for moons around extrasolar planets, astronomers are confronted with a stunning observation. Although 3400 of the 4500 exoplanets were discovered with the transit method and although there are well over 25 times as many moons…
Future missions like Roman, HabEx, and LUVOIR will directly image exoplanets in reflected light. While current near infrared direct imaging searches are only sensitive to young, self-luminous planets whose brightness is independent of their…
Motivated by the order-of-magnitude difference in the frequency of giant planets orbiting M dwarfs inferred by microlensing and radial velocity (RV) surveys, we present a method for comparing the statistical constraints on exoplanet…
In transiting planetary systems, the angle between the orbital angular momentum and the stellar spin is usually constrained through the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect observed in radial velocity and can be subject to large uncertainties,…
Exomoons are predicted to produce transit timing variations (TTVs) upon their host planet. Unfortunately, so are many other astrophysical phenomena - most notably other planets in the system. In this work, an argument of reductio ad…
Population studies of Kepler's multi-planet systems have revealed a surprising degree of structure in their underlying architectures. Information from a detected transiting planet can be combined with a population model to make predictions…
By observing the transits of exoplanets, one may determine many fundamental system parameters. I review current techniques and results for the parameters that can be measured with the greatest precision, specifically, the transit times, the…
Although atmospheric transmission spectroscopy of HD209458b with the Hubble Space Telescope has been very successful, attempts to detect its atmospheric absorption features using ground-based telescopes have so far been fruitless. Here we…
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft has been in orbit around Mars since March 2006. The Context Camera (CTX) on MRO has returned over 100,000 images of the planet at approximately 5-6 meters per pixel, providing nearly global…
The orbital parameters of extra-solar planets have a significant impact on the probability that the planet will transit the host star. This was recently demonstrated by the transit detection of HD 17156b whose favourable eccentricity and…
We present an adaptation of the exoplanet transit model code batman, in order to permit the generation of X-ray transits. Our underlying extended coronal model assumes an isothermal plasma that is radially symmetric. While this ignores the…
In this paper, the detectability of habitable exomoons orbiting around giant planets in M-dwarf systems using Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) and Transit Timing Durations (TDVs) with Kepler-class photometry is investigated. Light curves of…
We highlight a physical effect that is often not considered that impacts the calculation of model spectra of planets at secondary eclipse, affecting both emission and reflection spectra. The radius of the emitting surface of the planet is…
There is a unique solution of the planet and star parameters from a planet transit light curve with two or more transits if the planet has a circular orbit and the light curve is observed in a band pass where limb darkening is negligible.…
Gravitational microlensing is a powerful method for detecting and characterizing free-floating planetary-mass objects (FFPs). FFPs could have exomoons rotating them. In this work, we study the probability of realizing these systems (i.e.,…
We study the statistical characteristics of a box-fitting algorithm to analyze stellar photometric time series in the search for periodic transits by extrasolar planets. The algorithm searches for signals characterized by a periodic…
We analysed the chromatic data of the planetary transits observed with CoRoT to supply homogeneous time series in each of the CoRoT colours. In a first step, we cleaned the chromatic light curves from the contamination of nearby stars and…
Transiting planet discoveries have yielded a plethora of information towards understanding the structure and atmospheres of extra-solar planets. These discoveries have been restricted to the short-period or low-periastron distance regimes…