Related papers: Measurements of Stellar Inclinations for Kepler Pl…
Many stars, including those in binary or multiple systems, exhibit modified rotational evolution due to tidal interactions. While magnetic braking slows rotation in single stars, close binaries experience synchronization from tidal forces,…
Spinspotter is a robust and automated algorithm designed to extract stellar rotation periods from large photometric datasets with minimal supervision. Our approach uses the autocorrelation function (ACF) to identify stellar rotation periods…
Understanding magnetic activity on the surface of stars other than the Sun is important for exoplanet analyses to properly characterize an exoplanet's atmosphere and to further characterize stellar activity on a wide range of stars.…
The Robo-AO Kepler Planetary Candidate Survey is designed to observe every Kepler planet candidate host star with laser adaptive optics imaging to search for blended nearby stars, which may be physically associated companions and/or…
Kepler-13Ab (KOI-13) is an exoplanet orbiting a rapidly rotating A-type star. The system shows a significant spin-orbit misalignment and a changing transit duration most probably caused by the precession of the orbit. Here we present a…
One of the most difficult properties to derive for stars is their age. For cool main-sequence stars, gyrochronology relations can be used to infer stellar ages from measured rotation pe- riods and HR Diagram positions. These relations have…
The angle between stellar spin axes and planetary orbits -- stellar obliquity -- probes the dynamics of planetary migration and evolution. The obliquities of giant planets have been extensively studied because they are the most easily…
The mutual orbital alignment in multiple planetary systems is an important parameter for understanding their formation. There are a number of elaborate techniques to determine the alignment parameters using photometric or spectroscopic…
The stellar obliquity of a transiting planetary system can be constrained by combining measurements of the star's rotation period, radius, and projected rotational velocity. Here we present a hierarchical Bayesian technique for recovering…
The spin-orbit alignment of binary stars traces their formation and accretion history. Previous studies of spin-orbit alignment have been limited to small samples, slowly rotating solar-type stars, and/or wide visual binaries that not…
We analyze spectroscopic and photometric data to determine the projected inclinations of stars in 11 open clusters, placing constraints on the spin-axis distributions of six clusters. We combine these results with four additional clusters…
Detection of a planetary ring of exoplanets remains as one of the most attractive but challenging goals in the field. We present a methodology of a systematic search for exoplanetary rings via transit photometry of long-period planets. The…
KOI-13.01, a planet-sized companion in an optical double star was announced as one of the 1235 Kepler planet candidates in February 2011. The transit curves show significant distortion that was stable over the ~130 days time-span of the…
The dynamical influence of binary companions is expected to profoundly influence planetary systems. However, the difficulty of identifying planets in binary systems has left the magnitude of this effect uncertain; despite numerous…
We study the spin evolution of close-in planets in compact multi-planetary systems. The rotation period of these planets is often assumed to be synchronous with the orbital period due to tidal dissipation. Here we show that planet-planet…
We propose a method to be able to decide whether the planets of CoRoT-7 are moving on mutually inclined orbits in the order of i > 10 degrees. The extrasolar system CoRoT-7 is very special with respect to the closeness of the planets to the…
Kepler-16 is an eccentric low-mass eclipsing binary with a circumbinary transiting planet. Here we investigate the angular momentum of the primary star, based on Kepler photometry and Keck spectroscopy. The primary star's rotation period is…
A significant fraction of hot Jupiters have orbital axes misaligned with their host stars' spin axes. The large stellar obliquities of these giants have long been considered potential signatures of high-eccentricity migration, which is…
We visually inspected the light curves of 7557 Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs) to search for single transit events (STEs) possibly due to long-period giant planets. We identified 28 STEs in 24 KOIs, among which 14 events are newly…
A crucial diagnostic that can tell us about processes involved in the formation and dynamical evolutionof planetary systems is the angle between the rotation axis of a star and a planet's orbital angular momentum vector ("spin-orbit"…