Related papers: Practical suggestions on detecting exomoons in exo…
The highest priority recommendation of the Astro2020 Decadal Survey for space-based astronomy was the construction of an observatory capable of characterizing habitable worlds. In this paper series we explore the detectability of and…
The weak orbital-phase dependent reflection signal of an exoplanet contains information on the planet surface, such as the distribution of continents and oceans on terrestrial planets. This light curve is usually studied in the time domain,…
Several studies have shown that stellar activity features, such as occulted and non-occulted starspots, can affect the measurement of transit parameters biasing studies of transit timing variations and transmission spectra. We present…
Transiting extrasolar planets constitute only a small fraction of the range of stellar systems found to display periodic, shallow dimmings in wide-field surveys employing small-aperture camera arrays. Here we present an efficient selection…
The radial velocity technique is currently used to classify transiting objects. While capable of identifying grazing binary eclipses, this technique cannot reliably identify blends, a chance overlap of a faint background eclipsing binary…
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…
When we are fortunate enough to view an exoplanetary system nearly edge-on, the star and planet periodically eclipse each other. Observations of eclipses (transits and occultations) provide a bonanza of information that cannot be obtained…
With the growing number of projects dedicated to the search for extrasolar planets via transits, there is a need to develop fast, automatic, robust methods with a statistical background in order to efficiently do the analysis. We propose a…
The XO project aims at detecting transiting exoplanets around bright stars from the ground using small telescopes. The original configuration of XO (McCullough et al. 2005) has been changed and extended as described here. The instrumental…
Nearby giant exoplanets offer an opportunity to search for moons (exomoons) orbiting them. Here, we present a simulation framework for investigating the possibilities of detecting exomoons via their astrometric signal in planet-to-star…
We recommend that the search for exoplanets around binary stars be extended to include X-ray binaries in which the accretor is a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. We present a novel idea for detecting planets bound to such mass…
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.…
We investigate the effect of observing cadence on the precision of radius ratio values obtained from transit light curves by performing uniform Markov Chain Monte Carlo fits of 46 exoplanets observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey…
The habitability of exoplanets can be strongly influenced by the presence of an exomoon, and in some cases the exomoon itself could be a possible place for life to develop. For moons outside of the habitable zone, significant tidal heating…
The exquisite photometric precision of the Kepler space telescope now puts the detection of extrasolar moons at the horizon. Here, we firstly review observational and analytical techniques that have recently been proposed to find exomoons.…
Context. The photometric signal we receive from a star hosting a planet is modulated by the variation of the planet signal with its orbital phase. Such phase variations are observed for transiting hot Jupiters with current instrumentation,…
Though efforts to detect them have been made with a variety of methods, no technique can claim a successful, confirmed detection of a moon outside the Solar System yet. Moon detection methods are restricted in capability to detecting moons…
In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…
Exomoons are expected to produce potentially detectable transit timing variations (TTVs) upon their parent planet. Unfortunately, distinguishing moon-induced TTVs from other sources, in particular planet-planet interactions, has severely…
We derive solutions to transit light curves of exoplanets orbiting rapidly-rotating stars. These stars exhibit significant oblateness and gravity darkening, a phenomenon where the poles of the star have a higher temperature and luminosity…