Related papers: A College-Level Inquiry-Based Laboratory Activity …
Recent years have seen tremendous progress in our understanding of the extreme universe, which in turn points to even deeper questions to be further addressed. History has shown that the symbiosis between direct observations and laboratory…
The imaging instruments on board INTEGRAL have wide fields of view and high time resolution. Therefore, they are ideal instruments to search for pulsating sources and/or transient events. We are systematically searching for pulsations and…
The discovery of transiting extrasolar planets has enabled us a number of interesting stduies. Transit photometry reveals the radius and the orbital inclination of transiting planets, and thereby we can learn the true mass and the density…
The Kepler Mission is monitoring the brightness of ~150,000 stars searching for evidence of planetary transits. As part of the "Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler" (HEK) project, we report a planetary system with two confirmed planets and one…
In many upper-division lab courses, instructors implement multiweek student-led projects. During such projects, students may design and carry out experiments, collect and analyze data, document and report their findings, and collaborate…
Data from the Kepler satellite were analysed using the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) database. With the participation of 53 students, we determined the parameters of the HAT-P-7b (Kepler-2) exoplanet system (transit duration,…
Building on successful work on studying and transforming our senior-level Advanced Lab course, we have transformed our junior-level Electronics course to engage students in a variety of authentic scientific practices, including…
Continuous improvements of observations and modeling efforts have led to tremendous strides in exoplanetary science. However, as instruments and techniques advance laboratory data becomes more important to interpret exoplanet observations…
Because undergraduate participation in research is a longstanding and increasingly important aspect of the career path for future scientists, students can benefit from additional resources to introduce them to the culture and process of…
Long range observations in the field of astronomy have opened up our understanding of the Solar System, the Galaxy and the wider Universe. In this paper we discuss the idea of direct in-situ reconnaissance of nearby stellar systems, using…
New discoveries of transiting extrasolar planets are reported weekly. Ground based surveys as well as space borne observatories like CoRoT and Kepler are responsible for filling the statistical voids of planets on distant stellar systems. I…
Since 2008 we have run an observational program to accurately measure the characteristics of known exoplanet systems hosting close-in transiting giant planets, i.e. hot Jupiters. Our study is based on high-quality photometric follow-up…
We investigate the improved detection of extrasolar planets around eclipsing binaries using eclipse minima timing, and extrasolar moons around transiting planets using transit timing, offered by the upcoming COROT (ESA, 2005), Kepler (NASA,…
This article is based on lecture notes for the Marie Curie Training school "Initial Training on Numerical Methods for Active Matter". It provides an introductory overview of modeling approaches for active matter and is primarily targeted at…
We demonstrate how students' use of modeling can be examined and assessed using student notebooks collected from an upper-division electronics lab course. The use of models is a ubiquitous practice in undergraduate physics education, but…
Deep learning techniques have been well explored in the transiting exoplanet field; however, previous work mainly focuses on classification and inspection. In this work, we develop a novel detection algorithm based on a well proven object…
The photospheric spot activity of some of the stars with transiting planets discovered by the CoRoT space experiment is reviewed. Their out-of-transit light modulations are fitted by a spot model previously tested with the total solar…
Transits of bright stars offer a unique opportunity to study detailed properties of extrasolar planets that cannot be determined through radial-velocity observations. We propose a new technique to find such systems using all-sky…
While the positive outcomes of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have been extensively categorized, the mechanisms for those outcomes are less understood. Through lightly structured focus group interviews, we have extracted the…
Many of the planets discovered via the radial velocity technique are hot Jupiters in 3-5 day orbits with ~10$% chance of transiting their parent star. However, radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial…