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Kepler will monitor enough stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the Kepler photometry of such transits with precise radial velocity (RV)…
This article gives a very brief introduction about measuring the mass and radius of neutron star from X-ray observations. The masses and radii of neutron stars can be determined from photospheric radius expansion bursts in low-mass X-ray…
The rotation rate of a star has important implications for the detectability, characterisation and stability of any planets that may be orbiting it. This chapter gives a brief overview of stellar rotation before describing the methods used…
Minor bodies of the solar system can be used to measure the spectrum of the Sun as a star by observing sunlight reflected by their surfaces. To perform an accurate measurement of the radial velocity of the Sun as a star by this method, it…
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…
A surprisingly large amount of information on our solar system can be gained from simple measurements of the apparent angular diameters of the sun and the moon. This information includes the average density of the sun, the distance between…
The radius of a planet is a fundamental parameter that probes its composition and habitability. Precise radius measurements are typically derived from the fraction of starlight blocked when a planet transits its host star. The wide-field…
With planets orbiting stars, a planetary mass function should not be seen as a low-mass extension of the stellar mass function, but a proper formalism needs to take care of the fact that the statistical properties of planet populations are…
Astronomers have been using the measured luminosity to estimate the {\em luminous mass} of stars, based on empirically established mass-to-light ratio which seems to be only applicable to a special class of stars---the main-sequence…
Most extrasolar planets have been detected by their influence on their parent star, typically either gravitationally (the Doppler method) or by the small dip in brightness as the planet blocks a portion of the star (the transit method).…
Stellar fundamental properties (masses, radii, effective temperatures) can be extracted from observations of eclipsing binary systems with remarkable precision, often better than 2%. Such precise measurements afford us the opportunity to…
A unique analytical solution of planet and star parameters can be derived from an extrasolar planet transit light curve under a number of assumptions. This analytical solution can be used to choose the best planet transit candidates for…
One of the great challenges in understanding stars is measuring their masses. The best methods for measuring stellar masses include binary interaction, asteroseismology and stellar evolution models, but these methods are not ideal for red…
It has long been understood that the light curve of a transiting planet constrains the density of its host star. That fact is routinely used to improve measurements of the stellar surface gravity and has been argued to be an independent…
MassSpec, a method for determining the mass of a transiting exoplanet from its transmission spectrum alone, was proposed by \citet{dew13}. The premise of this method relies on the planet's surface gravity being extracted from the…
It has been a longstanding problem to determine, as far as possible, the characteristic masses of stars in terms of fundamental constants; the almost complete invariance of this mass as a function of the star-forming environment suggests…
For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…
We present analytic estimates of the fractional uncertainties on the mass, radius, surface gravity, and density of a transiting planet, using only empirical or semi-empirical measurements. We first express these parameters in terms of…
Kepler will monitor a sufficient number of stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the exquisite Kepler photometry of such transits with precise…
The evolution of a giant planet within the stellar envelope of a main-sequence star is investigated as a possible mechanism for enhancing the stellar metallicities of the parent stars of extrasolar planetary systems. Three-dimensional…