Related papers: The CoRoT Exoplanet program : status & results
A recently discovered group of nearby co-orbital objects is an attractive location for extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI) to locate a probe to observe Earth while not being easily seen. These near-Earth objects provide an ideal way to…
Ground-based telescopes have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the next decade and beyond. Extreme…
We give a general overview of what the scientific community refers to as "exocomets". The general definition of exocomets, as presented in this work, is discussed and compared with Solar System comets and interstellar objects, addressing…
Non-planetary bodies provide valuable insight into our current under- standing of planetary formation and evolution. Although these objects are challeng- ing to detect and characterize, the potential information to be drawn from them has…
This review focuses on recent results in advancing our understanding of the location and distribution of habitable exo-Earth environments. We first review the qualities that define a habitable planet/moon environment. We extend these…
We summarize the contribution of the HATNet project to extrasolar planet science, highlighting published planets (HAT-P-1b through HAT-P-26b). We also briefly discuss the operations, data analysis, candidate selection and confirmation…
The Exoplanet Tracker is a prototype of a new type of fibre-fed instrument for performing high precision relative Doppler measurements to detect extra-solar planets. A combination of Michelson interferometer and medium resolution…
For the last few decades the study of disks around stars young and old and of different types have progressed significantly. During the same time a completely new discipline, the study of exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than our…
In the near future there will be launched space missions (e.g. COROT, KEPLER), designed to detect Earth-like extrasolar planets. The orbital elements of these (still hypothetic) planets will contain some uncertainties, that can only be…
The fields of astronomy and astrophysics are currently engaged in an unprecedented era of discovery as recent missions have revealed thousands of exoplanets orbiting other stars. While the Kepler Space Telescope mission has enabled most of…
The Sky Polarization Observatory is an experiment selected by ESA for the Early Opportunity Phase onboard the International Space Station. SPOrt is the first payload specifically designed for polarization measurements, it will provide near…
It is now less than a decade since CoRoT initiated the space photometry revolution with breakthrough discoveries, and five years since Kepler started a series of similar advances. I'll set the context for this revolution noting the status…
In the broadest sense, the primary goal of exoplanet demographic surveys is to determine the frequency and distribution of planets as a function of as many of the physical parameters that may influence planet formation and evolution as…
Microlensing is the method of exoplanet detection that discovers solar system analog exoplanets. These are planets low in mass located in wide orbits around their host stars. Even though thousands of exoplanets are discovered, they are…
EChOSim is the end-to-end time-domain simulator of the Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory (EChO) space mission. EChOSim has been developed to assess the capability EChO has to detect and characterize the atmospheres of transiting…
Detections of transiting planets from the upcoming PLATO mission are expected to face significant contamination from contaminating eclipsing binaries, resulting in false positives. To counter this, a ground-based programme to acquire…
A brief review is given of a university outreach programme by a commercial organisation, which uses the Kepler exoplanet data. Key insights derived from this research are presented, along with discussion of the benefi ts and challenges of…
We describe an online database for extra-solar planetary-mass candidates, updated regularly as new data are available. We first discuss criteria for the inclusion of objects in the catalog: "definition" of a planet and several aspects of…
Transit-spectroscopy of exoplanets is one of the key observational techniques to characterize the extrasolar planet and its atmosphere. The observational challenges of these measurements require dedicated instrumentation and only the space…
The detections of small, rocky exoplanets have surged in recent years and will likely continue to do so. To know whether a rocky exoplanet is habitable, we have to characterise its atmosphere and surface. A promising characterisation method…