Related papers: A Posteriori Transit Probabilities
The probability that an exoplanet transits its host star is high for planets in close orbits, but drops off rapidly for increasing semimajor axes. This makes transit surveys for planets with large semimajor axes orbiting bright stars…
Transits on single stars are rare. The probability rarely exceeds a few per cent. Furthermore, this probability rapidly approaches zero at increasing orbital period. Therefore transit surveys have been predominantly limited to the inner…
We present a framework to conservatively estimate the probability that any particular planet-like transit signal observed by the Kepler mission is in fact a planet, prior to any ground-based follow-up efforts. We use Monte Carlo methods…
Most of the known transiting exoplanets are in short-period orbits, largely due to the bias inherent in detecting planets through the transit technique. However, the eccentricity distribution of the known radial velocity planets results in…
Observational biases distort our view of nature, such that the patterns we see within a surveyed population of interest are often unrepresentative of the truth we seek. Transiting planets currently represent the most informative data set on…
In Bayesian applications, there is a huge interest in rapid and accurate estimation of the posterior distribution, particularly for high dimensional or hierarchical models. In this article, we propose to use optimization to solve for a…
The observed properties of transiting exoplanets are an exceptionally rich source of information that allows us to understand and characterize their physical properties. Unfortunately, only a relatively small fraction of the known…
Over two decades of exoplanetology have yielded thousands of discoveries, yet some types of systems are yet to be observed. Circumstellar planets around one star in a binary have been found, but not for tight binaries (< 5 AU).…
[ABRIDGED] Since the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planet, transit timing has been recognized as a powerful method to discover and characterize additional planets in these systems. However, the gravitational influence of…
For the majority of short period exoplanets transiting massive stars with radiative envelopes, the spin angular momentum of the host star is greater than the planetary orbital angular momentum. In this case, the orbits of the planets will…
This paper considers whether the population of known transiting exoplanets provides evidence for additional outer planets on inclined orbits, due to the perturbing effect of such planets on the orbits of inner planets. As such, we develop a…
Planets on eccentric orbits have a higher geometric probability of transiting their host star. By application of Bayes' theorem, we reverse this logic to show that the eccentricity distribution of transiting planets is positively biased.…
Transiting extrasolar planets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation of planets as well as their internal structure. The existence of a secondary eclipse enables further study of the thermal properties of the the planet by…
Estimating the marginal likelihoods is an essential feature of model selection in the Bayesian context. It is especially crucial to have good estimates when assessing the number of planets orbiting stars when the models explain the noisy…
Transit times around single stars can be described well by a linear ephemeris. However, transit times in circumbinary systems are influenced both by the gravitational perturbations and the orbital phase variations of the central binary…
We introduce a new method to estimate the probability that an extragalactic transient source is associated with a candidate host galaxy. This approach relies solely on simple observables: sky coordinates and their uncertainties, galaxy…
The {\it Kepler} mission has detected thousands of planetary systems with 1-7 transiting planets packed within 0.7~au from their host stars. There is an apparent excess of single-transit planet systems that cannot be explained by transit…
Circumbinary planets are generally more likely to transit than equivalent single-star planets, but practically the geometry and orbital dynamics of circumbinary planets make the chance of observing a transit inherently time-dependent. In…
The findings of more than 350 extrasolar planets, most of them nontransiting Hot Jupiters, have revealed correlations between the metallicity of the main-sequence (MS) host stars and planetary incidence. This connection can be used to…
Of the approximately 350 extrasolar planets currently known, of order 10% orbit evolved stars with radii R >~ 2.5 R_sun. These planets are of particular interest because they tend to orbit more massive hosts, and have been subjected to…