Related papers: Improving Transit Predictions of Known Exoplanets …

When extrasolar planets are observed to transit their parent stars, we are granted unprecedented access to their physical properties. It is only for transiting planets that we are permitted direct estimates of the planetary masses and…

The transit technique is responsible for the majority of exoplanet discoveries to date. Characterizing these planets involves careful modeling of their transit profiles. A common technique involves expressing the transit duration using a…

A promising method to detect earth-sized exoplanets is the timing analysis of a known transit. The technique allows a search for variations in transit duration or center induced by the perturbation of a third body, e.g. a second planet or…

I present an initial investigation into a new planet detection technique that uses the transit timing of a known, transiting planet. The transits of a solitary planet orbiting a star occur at equally spaced intervals in time. If a second…

Short-period exoplanets may exhibit orbital precession driven by several different processes, including tidal interactions with their host stars and secular interactions with additional planets. This motion manifests as periodic shifts in…

This study presents a systematic approach to optimize the scheduling of exoplanet observations using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), focusing on targets discovered by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). We developed a…

As a direct result of ongoing efforts to detect more exoplanetary systems, an ever-increasing number of multiple-planet systems are being announced. But how many of these systems are truly what they seem? In many cases, such systems are…

Detection of a planetary ring of exoplanets remains as one of the most attractive but challenging goals in the field. We present a methodology of a systematic search for exoplanetary rings via transit photometry of long-period planets. The…

The EXPLORE Project is a series of searches for transiting extrasolar planets using large-format mosaic CCD cameras on 4-m class telescopes. Radial velocity follow-up is done on transiting planet candidates with 8--10m class telescopes. We…

Characterization of exoplanets has matured in recent years, particularly through studies of exoplanetary atmospheres of transiting planets at infra-red wavelenegths. The primary source for such observations has been the Spitzer Space…

Rings around giant exoplanets (hereafter 'exorings') are still a missing planetary phenomenon among the vast number of discovered planets. Despite the fact there exist a large number of methods for identifying and characterizing these…

(Abridged) We discuss the design considerations of the EXPLORE (EXtra-solar PLanet Occultation REsearch) project, a series of transiting planet searches using 4-m-class telescopes to continuously monitor a single field of stars in the…

Both direct and indirect methods of exoplanet detection rely upon detailed knowledge of the potential host stars. Such stellar characterization allows for accurate extraction of planetary properties, as well as contributing to our overall…

Two decades ago, astronomers began detecting planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, so-called exoplanets. Since that time, the rate of detections and the sensitivity to ever-smaller planets has improved dramatically with several…

The two dominant features in the distribution of orbital parameters for close-in exoplanets are the prevalence of circular orbits for very short periods, and the observation that planets on closer orbits tend to be heavier. The first…

The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…

Of the known transiting extra-solar planets, a few have been detected through photometric follow-up observations of radial velocity planets. Perhaps the best known of these is the transiting exoplanet HD 209458b. For hot Jupiters (periods…

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly…

In the last decade, over a million stars were monitored to detect transiting planets. Manual interpretation of potential exoplanet candidates is labor intensive and subject to human error, the results of which are difficult to quantify.…

Context: TESS has been successfully launched and has begin data acquisition. To expedite the science that may be performed with the resulting data it is necessary to gain a good understanding of planetary yields. Given the observing…