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We present and discuss five candidate exoplanetary systems identified with the Kepler spacecraft. These five systems show transits from multiple exoplanet candidates. Should these objects prove to be planetary in nature, then these five…
The Kepler Mission, launched on Mar 6, 2009 was designed with the explicit capability to detect Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars using the transit photometry method. Results from just forty-three days of data…
Context: Detecting moons around exoplanets is a major goal of current and future observatories. Moons are suspected to influence rocky exoplanet habitability, and gaseous exoplanets in stellar habitable zones could harbour abundant and…
Astronomical transients are stellar objects that become temporarily brighter on various timescales and have led to some of the most significant discoveries in cosmology and astronomy. Some of these transients are the explosive deaths of…
The detection of planetary transits in the light curves of active stars, featuring correlated noise in the form of stellar variability, remains a challenge. Depending on the noise characteristics, we show that the traditional technique that…
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.…
The Kepler Mission seeks to detect Earth-size planets transiting solar-like stars in its ~115 deg^2 field of view over the course of its 3.5 year primary mission by monitoring the brightness of each of ~156,000 Long Cadence stellar targets…
The Kepler Space Telescope has discovered thousands of planets via the transit method. The transit timing variations of these planets allows us not only to infer the existence of other planets, transiting or not, but to characterize a…
While the solar system contains about 20 times more moons than planets, no moon has been confirmed around any of the thousands of extrasolar planets known so far. Tools for an uncomplicated identification of the most promising exomoon…
We investigate the influence of lunar-like satellites on the infrared orbital light curves of Earth-analog extra-solar planets. Such light curves will be obtained by NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and ESA's Darwin missions as a…
Kepler has revolutionized the study of transiting planets with its unprecedented photometric precision on more than 150,000 target stars. Most of the transiting planet candidates detected by Kepler have been observed as long-cadence targets…
From simulations of transit observations, it is found that the detectability of extrasolar planets depends only on two parameters: The signal-to-noise ratio during a transit, and the number of data points observed during transits. All other…
The Kepler planet sample can only be used to reconstruct the underlying planet occurrence rate if the detection efficiency of the Kepler pipeline is known, here we present the results of a second experiment aimed at characterising this…
Transits of habitable planets around solar-like stars are expected to be shallow, and to have long periods, which means low information content. The current bottleneck in the detection of such transits is caused in large part by the…
The mid-transit times of an exoplanet may be non-periodic. The variations in the timing of the transits with respect to a single period, that is, the transit timing variations (TTVs), can sometimes be attributed to perturbations by other…
We survey the methods proposed in the literature for detecting moons of extrasolar planets in terms of their ability to distinguish between prograde and retrograde moon orbits, an important tracer of moon formation channel. We find that…
We present the results of an extensive study of the detectability of Earth-sized planets and super-Earths in the habitable zones of cool and low-mass stars using transit timing variation method. We have considered a system consisting of a…
We present a new method for confirming transiting planets based on the combination of transit timingn variations (TTVs) and dynamical stability. Correlated TTVs provide evidence that the pair of bodies are in the same physical system.…
We apply AnalyticLC, an analytic model described in an accompanying paper, to interpret Kepler data of systems that contain two or three transiting planets. We perform tests to verify that the obtained solutions agree with full N-body…
In the search for moons around extrasolar planets, astronomers are confronted with a stunning observation. Although 3400 of the 4500 exoplanets were discovered with the transit method and although there are well over 25 times as many moons…