Related papers: The CoRoT Exoplanet program : status & results
The search for habitable exoplanets and life beyond the Solar System is one of the most compelling scientific opportunities of our time. Nevertheless, the high cost of building facilities that can address this topic and the keen public…
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
The primary objectives of the ExoplANETS-A project are to: establish new knowledge on exoplanet atmospheres; establish new insight on influence of the host star on the planet atmosphere; disseminate knowledge, using online, web-based…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in…
Direct imaging surveys for exoplanets commonly exclude binary stars from their target lists, leaving a large part of the overall planet demography unexplored. To address this gap in our understanding of planet formation and evolution, we…
Even though it was not designed as an exoplanetary research mission, the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) has been opportunistically used for a novel experiment, in which Earth serves as a proxy exoplanet. More than two years of…
The analysis of the CoRoT space mission data was performed aiming to test a method that selects, among the several light curves observed, the transiting systems that likely host a low-mass star orbiting the main target. The method…
The Kepler spacecraft, whose single instrument was a 0.95 m diameter wide-field telescope, operated in a heliocentric orbit for nearly a decade, returning a wealth of data that have revolutionized exoplanet science. Kepler data have been…
The direct characterization of exoplanetary systems with high contrast imaging is among the highest priorities for the broader exoplanet community. As large space missions will be necessary for detecting and characterizing exo-Earth twins,…
The circumplanetary environments in our Solar System host a stunning array of moon and ring systems. Study of these environs has yielded valuable insights into planetary system formation and evolution, and there is every reason to believe…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
Thueringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg (TLS) has started to operate a small dedicated telescope - the Tautenburg Exoplanet Search Telescope (TEST) - searching for transits of extrasolar planets in photometric time series observations. In a…
Exoplanets mass measurements will be a critical next step to assess the habitability of Earth-like planets: a key aspect of the 2020 vision in the previous decadal survey and also central to NASA's strategic priorities. Precision astrometry…
We study the planet populations in the discovery window of the CoRoT-space-telescope scheduled for launch on December 27th. We base the prediction on `first principles' calculations of planet formation in the framework of the planetesimal…
Exoplanet science often involves using the system parameters of real exoplanets for tasks such as simulations, fitting routines, and target selection for proposals. Several exoplanet catalogues are already well established but often lack a…
The discovery of the short-period giant exoplanet population, the so-called hot Jupiter population, and their link to brown dwarfs and low-mass stars challenges the conventional view of planet formation and evolution. We took advantage of…
In this chapter we review our knowledge of our galaxy's cometary population outside our Oort Cloud - exocomets and Interstellar Objects (ISOs). We start with a brief overview of planetary system formation, viewed as a general process around…
We describe the contents and functionality of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, a database and tool set funded by NASA to support astronomers in the exoplanet community. The current content of the database includes interactive tables containing…
The field of exoplanets has rapidly expanded from the exclusivity of exoplanet detection to include exoplanet characterization. A key step towards this characterization will be retrieval of planetary albedos and rotation rates from highly…