Related papers: Prospecting transit duration variations in extraso…
Transit timing variations (TTVs) of exoplanets are normally interpreted as the consequence of gravitational interaction with additional bodies in the system. However, TTVs can also be caused by deformations of the system transits by…
A transiting planet eclipses part of the rotating stellar surface, thereby producing an anomalous Doppler shift of the stellar spectrum. Here I review how this "Rossiter-McLaughlin Effect" can be used to characterize exoplanetary systems.…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect has been widely used to estimate the sky-projected spin-orbit angle, $\lambda$, of transiting planetary systems. Most of the previous analysis assume that the host stars are rigid rotators in which the…
The Transit Timing Variation (TTV) method relies on monitoring changes in timing of transits of known exoplanets. Non-transiting planets in the system can be inferred from TTVs by their gravitational interaction with the transiting planet.…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect is the distortion of stellar spectral lines that occurs during eclipses or transits, due to stellar rotation. We assess the future prospects for using the RM effect to measure the alignment of planetary…
Transit timing variation (TTV) provides rich information about the mass and orbital properties of exoplanets, which are often obtained by solving an inverse problem via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In this paper, we design a new…
I present an initial investigation into a new planet detection technique that uses the transit timing of a known, transiting planet. The transits of a solitary planet orbiting a star occur at equally spaced intervals in time. If a second…
For extrasolar planets with orbital periods, P>10 days, radial velocity surveys find non-circular orbital eccentricities are common, <e>~0.3. Future surveys for extrasolar planets using the transit technique will also have sensitivity to…
The information gathered from observing planetary systems is not limited to the discovery of planets, but also includes the observational upper limits constraining the presence of any additional planets. Incorporating these upper limits…
We report a measurement of the Rossiter--McLaughlin effect in the transiting extrasolar planetary system TrES-1, via simultaneous spectroscopic and photometric observations with the Subaru and MAGNUM telescopes. By modeling the radial…
In this PhD dissertation, I discuss issues of the Radial Velocities (RV) and transit methods. These techniques allow us to derive the mass and radius of an exoplanet, necessary to model its bulk structure and to have insight on its…
Transit timing variations - deviations from strict periodicity between successive passages of a transiting planet - can be used to probe the structure and dynamics of multiple-planet systems. In this paper, we examine prospects for…
It is shown herein that planets with eccentric orbits are more likely to transit than circularly orbiting planets with the same semimajor axis by a factor of (1-e^2)^{-1}. If the orbital parameters of discovered transiting planets are…
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…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin effect occurs during a planet's transit. It provides the main means of measuring the sky-projected spin-orbit angle between a planet's orbital plane, and its host star's equatorial plane. Observing the…
Transit timing variation (TTV) is a useful tool for studying the orbital properties of transiting objects. However, few TTV studies have been done on transiting brown dwarfs (BDs) around solar-type stars. Here we study the long-term TTV of…
Stellar activity features such as spots can create complications in determining planetary parameters through spectroscopic and photometric observations. The overlap of a transiting planet and a stellar spot, for instance, can produce…
Obliquity measurements for stars hosting relatively long-period giant planets with weak star-planet tidal interactions may play a key role in distinguishing between formation theories for shorter-period hot Jupiters. Few such obliquity…
We propose that the presence of additional planets in extrasolar planetary systems can be detected by long-term transit timing studies. If a transiting planet is on an eccentric orbit then the presence of another planet causes a secular…
The transit timing variation (TTV) method allows the detection of non-transiting planets through their gravitational perturbations. Since TTVs are strongly enhanced in systems close to mean-motion resonances (MMR), even a low mass planet…