Related papers: Using Stellar Densities to Evaluate Transiting Exo…
The requirements on space missions designed to study Terrestrial exoplanets are discussed. We then investigate whether the design of such a mission, specifically the Darwin nulling interferometer, can be carried out in a simplified…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will be conducting a nearly all-sky photometric survey over two years, with a core mission goal to discover small transiting exoplanets orbiting nearby bright stars. It will obtain 30-minute…
Oscillations occur in stars of most masses and essentially all stages of evolution. Asteroseismology is the study of the frequencies and other properties of stellar oscillations, from which we can extract fundamental parameters such as…
Understanding the distribution and occurrence rate of small planets was a fundamental goal of the Kepler transiting exoplanet mission, and could be improved with K2 and TESS. Deriving accurate exoplanetary radii requires accurate…
Young associations in star forming regions are stellar systems that allow us to understand the mechanisms that characterise the stars in their early life and what happens around them. In particular, the analysis of the disks and of the…
One of the great quests of astronomy is to obtain the spectrum of a terrestrial planet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star, and the dominant challenge in doing so is to isolate the light of the planet from that of the star.…
The Kepler mission has discovered over 2500 exoplanet candidates in the first two years of spacecraft data, with approximately 40% of them in candidate multi-planet systems. The high rate of multiplicity combined with the low rate of…
We present a way of searching for non-transiting exoplanets with dusty tails. In the transiting case, the extinction by dust during the transit removes more light from the beam than is scattered into it. Thus, the forward scattering…
We present results of a search for transiting exoplanets in 10-yr long photometry with thousands of epochs taken in the direction of the Galactic bulge. This photometry was collected in the fourth phase of the Optical Gravitational Lensing…
The small sizes of low mass stars in principle provide an opportunity to find Earth-like planets and "super-Earths" in habitable zones via transits. Large area synoptic surveys like Pan-STARRS and LSST will observe large numbers of low mass…
We present a new method to assess the properties of transiting planet candidates by multicolor photometry. By analyzing multicolor transit/eclipse light curves and apparent magnitudes of the target in parallel, this method attempts to…
The physical characterization of exoplanets will require to take spectra at several orbital positions. For that purpose, a direct imaging capability is necessary. Direct imaging requires an efficient stellar suppression mechanism,…
Direct imaging of exoplanets requires to separate the background noise from the exoplanet signals. Statistical methods have been recently proposed to avoid subtracting any signal of interest as opposed to initial self-subtracting methods…
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 report new methods for evaluating realistic observing programs that search stars for planets by direct imaging, where observations are selected from an optimized star list, and where stars can be observed multiple times. We show how…
Observations of transiting extrasolar planets are of key importance to our understanding of planets because their mass, radius, and mass density can be determined. The CoRoT space mission allows us to achieve a very high photometric…
Astrometry is a powerful technique to study the populations of extrasolar planets around nearby stars. It gives access to a unique parameter space and is therefore required for obtaining a comprehensive picture of the properties,…
Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, those most adequate for life to begin and evolve have been sought. Due to observational bias, however, most of the discovered planets so far are gas giants, precluding their habitability.…
Late-type stars are known to host numerous exoplanets, and their photometric variability, primarily caused by rotational modulation, provides a unique opportunity to study starspots. As exoplanets transit in front of their host stars, they…
We report the results of a prototype photometric search for transiting extrasolar planets using Subaru Suprime-Cam. Out of about 100,000 stars monitored around the Galactic plane (l=90 degree,b=0 degree), we find that 7,700 (27,000) stars…