Related papers: Astrophysical false positives in exoplanet transit…
We investigate in this paper the astrophysical false-positive configuration in exoplanet-transit surveys that involves eclipsing binaries and giant planets which present only a secondary eclipse, as seen from the Earth. To test how an…
Our incomplete understanding of the formation of gas giants and of their mass-radius relationship has motivated ground-based, wide-field surveys for new transiting extrasolar giant planets. Yet, astrophysical false positives have dominated…
The Kepler Mission was launched on March 6, 2009 to perform a photometric survey of more than 100,000 dwarf stars to search for Earth-size planets with the transit technique. The reliability of the resulting planetary candidate list relies…
Astrophysical false positives due to stellar eclipsing binaries pose one of the greatest challenges to ground-based surveys for transiting Hot Jupiters. We have used known properties of multiple star systems and Hot Jupiter systems to…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a NASA-sponsored Explorer mission that will perform a wide-field survey for planets that transit bright host stars. Here, we predict the properties of the transiting planets that TESS will…
Many ground-based photometric surveys are now under way, and five of them have been successful at detecting transiting exoplanets. Nevertheless, detecting transiting planets has turned out to be much more challenging than initially…
A large fraction of the smallest transiting planet candidates discovered by the Kepler and CoRoT space missions cannot be confirmed by a dynamical measurement of the mass using currently available observing facilities. To establish their…
Context. The CoRoT satellite searches for planets by applying the transit method, monitoring up to 12 000 stars in the galactic plane for 150 days in each observation run. This search is contaminated by a large fraction of false positives,…
Photometry with the transit method has arguably been the most successful exoplanet discovery method to date. A short overview about the rise of that method to its present status is given. The method's strength is the rich set of parameters…
Observing extrasolar planetary transits is one of the only ways that we may infer the masses and radii of planets outside the Solar System. As such, the detections made by photometric transit surveys are one of the only foreseeable ways…
Wide-field photometric transit surveys for Jupiter-sized planets are inundated by astrophysical false positives, namely systems that contain an eclipsing binary and mimic the desired photometric signature. We discuss several examples of…
Surveys searching for transiting exoplanets have found many more candidates than they have been able to confirm as true planets. This situation is especially acute with the Kepler survey, which has found over 2300 candidates but has…
We investigate the rate of false planetary transit detection due to blending with eclipsing binaries. Our approach is purely empirical and is based on the analysis of the artificially blended light curves of the eclipsing binary stars in…
Searches for planetary transits find many astrophysical false positives as a by-product. There are four main types analyzed in the literature: a grazing-incidence eclipsing binary star, an eclipsing binary star with a small radius companion…
Detections of transiting planets from the upcoming PLATO mission are expected to face significant contamination from contaminating eclipsing binaries, resulting in false positives. To counter this, a ground-based programme to acquire…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is focusing on relatively bright stars and has found thousands of planet candidates. However, mainly because of the low spatial resolution of its cameras ($\approx$ 21 arcsec/pixel), TESS is…
Transit search programs such as CoRoT and Kepler now have the capability of detecting planets as small as the Earth. The detection of these planets however requires the removal of all false positives. Although many false positives can be…
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…
One of the persistent complications in searches for transiting exoplanets is the low percentage of the detected candidates that ultimately prove to be planets, which significantly increases the load on the telescopes used for the follow-up…
The upcoming TESS mission will detect thousands of candidate transiting exoplanets. Those candidates require extensive follow-up observations to distinguish genuine planets from false positives, and to resolve the physical properties of the…