Related papers: Practical suggestions on detecting exomoons in exo…
Our knowledge of the Solar System, encourages us to beleive that we might expect exomoons to be present around some of the known exoplanets. With present hardware and existing optical astronomy methods we shall not be able to find exomoons…
Phase curves are the best technique to probe the three dimensional structure of exoplanets' atmospheres. In this chapter we first review current exoplanets phase curve observations and the particular challenges they face. We then describe…
The Wide Field Camera Transit Survey is a pioneer program aimed to search for extra-solar planets in the near-infrared. The standard data reduction pipeline of the program uses aperture photometry to construct the light curves. We…
Detecting exoplanet transits at X-ray wavelengths would provide a window into the effects of high energy irradiation on the upper atmospheres of planets. However, stars are relatively dim in the X-ray, making exoplanet transit detections…
We investigate whether rings around extrasolar planets could be detected from those planets' transit lightcurves. To this end we develop a basic theoretical framework for calculating and interpreting the lightcurves of ringed planet…
Spotted stars in eclipsing binary systems allow us to gather significant information about the stellar surface inhomogeneities that is otherwise impossible from only photometric data. Starspots can be scanned using the eclipse (or transit)…
Context. We present a model-free method for mapping surface brightness variations. Aims. We aim to develop a method that is not dependent on either stellar atmosphere models or limb-darkening equation. This method is optimized for exoplanet…
One of the persistent complications in searches for transiting exoplanets is the low percentage of the detected candidates that ultimately prove to be planets, which significantly increases the load on the telescopes used for the follow-up…
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…
With the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the search for planets like Earth and life in the universe, is quickly gaining momentum. In the future, large space observatories could directly detect the light scattered from…
Rotational mapping and glint are two proposed methods to directly detect liquid water on the surface of habitable exoplanets. However, false positives for both methods may prevent the unambiguous detection of exoplanet oceans. We use…
We review the state of the art in follow-up photometry for planetary transit searches. Three topics are discussed: (1) Photometric monitoring of planets discovered by radial velocity to detect possible transits (2) Follow-up photometry of…
We investigate a new approach to the detection of companions to extrasolar planets beyond the transit method. We discuss the possibility of the existence of binary planets. We develop a method based on the imaging of a planet-companion as…
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.…
Stellar activity causes difficulties in the characterization of transiting exoplanets. Studies have been performed to quantify its impact on infrared interferometry, but not in the visible domain, which however allows reaching better…
Giant planets in the habitable zone may host exomoons with conditions conducive to life. In this paper we describe a method by which the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) could detect such moons: broadband reflected-light lunar eclipses…
Out of the known transiting extrasolar planets, the majority are gas giants orbiting their host star at close proximity. Both theoretical and observational studies support the hypothesis that such bodies emit significant amounts of flux…
If planetary systems are ubiquitous then a fraction of stars should possess a transiting planet when being microlensed. This paper presents a study of the influence of such planets on microlensing light curves. For the giant planets…
Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while…
We present a solution for the light curve of two bodies mutually transiting a star with polynomial limb darkening. The term "mutual transit" in this work refers to a transit of the star during which overlap occurs between the two transiting…