Related papers: A sub-Mercury-sized exoplanet
The detection of lower mass planets now being reported via radial velocity and microlensing surveys suggests that they may be ubiquitous. If missions such as Kepler are able to confirm this, the detection and study of rocky planets via…
Each of the giant planets within the Solar System has large moons but none of these moons have their own moons (which we call ${\it submoons}$). By analogy with studies of moons around short-period exoplanets, we investigate the…
The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation…
CoRoT-7 b, a planet about 70% larger than the Earth orbiting a Sun-like star, is the first-discovered rocky exoplanet, and hence has been dubbed a "super-Earth". Some initial studies suggested that since the planet is so close to its host…
A variety of terrestrial planets with different physical parameters and exotic atmospheres might plausibly exist outside our Solar System, waiting to be detected by the next generation of space-exploration missions. Some of these planets…
The Kepler mission revealed a class of planets known as ''super-puffs,'' with masses only a few times larger than Earth's but radii larger than Neptune, giving them very low mean densities. All three of the known planets orbiting the young…
Using the cumulative catalog of planets detected by the NASA Kepler mission, we reconstruct the intrinsic occurrence of Earth- to Neptune-size (1 - 4$R_{\oplus}$) planets and their distributions with radius and orbital period. We analyze…
Three transiting exoplanet candidate stars were discovered in a ground-based photometric survey prior to the launch of NASA's {\it Kepler} mission. {\it Kepler} observations of them were obtained during Quarter 1 of the {\it Kepler}…
The relatively recent detections of the first three transiting super-Earths mark the beginning of a subfield within exoplanets that is both fruitful and challenging. The first step into characterizing these objects is to infer their…
Most Sun-like stars in the Galaxy reside in gravitationally-bound pairs of stars called "binary stars". While long anticipated, the existence of a "circumbinary planet" orbiting such a pair of normal stars was not definitively established…
A space-based gravitational microlensing exoplanet survey will provide a statistical census of exoplanets with masses down to 0.1 Earth-masses and orbital separations ranging from 0.5AU to infinity. This includes analogs to all the Solar…
The widespread prevalence of close-in, nearly coplanar super-Earth- and sub-Neptune-sized planets in multiple-planet systems was one of the most surprising results from the Kepler mission. By studying a uniform sample of Kepler "multis"…
On 1 February 2011 the Kepler Mission released data for 156,453 stars observed from the beginning of the science observations on 2 May through 16 September 2009. There are 1235 planetary candidates with transit like signatures detected in…
The Kepler planetary system consists of two exoplanets at similar separations (0.115 & 0.128 AU), which have dramatically different densities. The inner planet has a density consistent with an Earth-like composition, while the outer planet…
The ancestor philosophers' dream of thousands of new worlds is finally realised: about 3500 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the neighborhood of our Sun. Most of them are very different from those we used to know in our Solar…
Observations of very low-mass stars with Kepler represent an excellent opportunity to search for planetary transits and to characterize optical photometric variability at the cool end of the stellar mass distribution. In this paper, we…
An exoplanet's structure and composition are first-order controls of the planet's habitability. We explore which aspects of bulk terrestrial planet composition and interior structure affect the chief observables of an exoplanet: its mass…
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
We analyze data from the Quarter 1-17 Data Release 24 (Q1--Q17 DR24) planet candidate catalog from NASA's Kepler mission, specifically comparing systems with single transiting planets to systems with multiple transiting planets, and…
Since the discovery of Kepler-10, the system has received considerable interest because it contains a small, rocky planet which orbits the star in less than a day. The system's parameters, announced by the Kepler team and subsequently used…