Related papers: A Compact Spectrograph to Search for Extrasolar Pl…
Mountain ranges, volcanoes, trenches, and craters are common on rocky bodies throughout the Solar System, and we might we expect the same for rocky exoplanets. With ever larger telescopes under design and a growing need to not just detect…
Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while…
Microlensing is a proven extrasolar planet search method that has already yielded the detection of four exoplanets. These detections have changed our understanding of planet formation ``beyond the snowline'' by demonstrating that…
In the recent years, interferometric arrays of optical telescopes have reached sizes of the order of 100m, but they have yet to produce high-resolution images. The analysis of image formation now shows that such images are obtainable…
We analyze 8 years of precise radial velocity measurements from the Keck Planet Search, characterizing the detection threshold, selection effects, and completeness of the survey. We carry out a systematic search for planets by assessing the…
Although the extra-solar planets discovered so far are of the giant, gaseous, type, the increased sensitivity of future surveys will result in the discovery of lower mass planets. The detection of O2 in the atmosphere of a rocky extra-solar…
Our knowledge of the Solar System, encourages us to beleive that we might expect exomoons to be present around some of the known exoplanets. With present hardware and existing optical astronomy methods we shall not be able to find exomoons…
A spectroscopic technique employing an iodine absorption cell (I_2) to superimpose a reference spectrum onto a stellar spectrum is currently the most widely adopted approach to obtain precision radial velocities of solar-type stars. It has…
SPICES (Spectro-Polarimetric Imaging and Characterization of Exoplanetary Systems) is a five-year M-class mission proposed to ESA Cosmic Vision. Its purpose is to image and characterize long-period extrasolar planets and circumstellar disks…
The discovery of the short-period giant exoplanet population, the so-called hot Jupiter population, and their link to brown dwarfs and low-mass stars challenges the conventional view of planet formation and evolution. We took advantage of…
In this paper, we review the various ways in which an infrared stellar interferometer can be used to perform direct detection of extrasolar planetary systems. We first review the techniques based on classical stellar interferometry, where…
The radial velocity technique is currently used to classify transiting objects. While capable of identifying grazing binary eclipses, this technique cannot reliably identify blends, a chance overlap of a faint background eclipsing binary…
Spectral retrieval techniques are currently our best tool to interpret the observed exoplanet atmospheric data. Said techniques retrieve the optimal atmospheric components and parameters by identifying the best fit to an observed…
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…
The physical characterization of exoplanets will require to take spectra at several orbital positions. For that purpose, a direct imaging capability is necessary. Direct imaging requires an efficient stellar suppression mechanism,…
We present an analysis of precision radial velocity measurements for 580 stars from the Keck survey. We first discuss the detection threshold of the survey, and then describe a Bayesian approach to constrain the distribution of extrasolar…
This report summarizes the current status of efforts to develop the technologies required for coronographic space missions aimed at the detection of terrestrial extrasolar planets.
(shortened for arXiv) We aim to progress towards more efficient exoplanet detection around active stars by optimizing the use of Doppler Imaging in radial velocity measurements. We propose a simple method to simultaneously extract a…
The currently feasible method of detection of Earth-mass planets is transit photometry, with detection probability decreasing with a planet's distance from the star. The existence or otherwise of short-period terrestrial planets will tell…
Inverse techniques are used to extract information about an exoplanet's atmosphere. These techniques are prone to biased results if the appropriate forward model is not used. One assumption used in a forward model is to assume that the…