Related papers: Planetary Transits with the ALMA Radio Interferome…
Transiting exoplanets provide detailed access to their atmospheres, as the planet's signal can be effectively separated from that of its host star. For transiting exoplanets three fundamental atmospheric measurements are possible:…
I present an initial investigation into a new planet detection technique that uses the transit timing of a known, transiting planet. The transits of a solitary planet orbiting a star occur at equally spaced intervals in time. If a second…
We investigate the effect that the turbulent mixing strength parameter $\alpha_{\rm{turb}}$ plays on near-infrared polarimetric and sub-millimetre interferometric imaging observations of transitional discs (TDs) with a gap carved by a…
Debris discs are known to exist around many planet-host stars, but no debris dust has been found so far in systems with transiting planets. Using publicly available catalogues, we searched for infrared excesses in such systems. In the…
In a transiting planetary system, the presence of a second planet will cause the time interval between transits to vary. These transit timing variations (TTV) are particularly large near mean-motion resonances and can be used to infer the…
The study of stellar oscillations - asteroseismology - has revolutionized our understanding of the physical properties of the Sun, and similar potential for other stars has been demonstrated in recent years. In particular, asteroseismic…
Solar system planets move on almost circular orbits. In strong contrast, many massive gas giant exoplanets travel on highly elliptical orbits, whereas the shape of the orbits of smaller, more terrestrial, exoplanets remained largely…
It has been suggested that hot stellar wind gas in a bow shock around an exoplanet is sufficiently opaque to absorb stellar photons and give rise to an observable transit depth at optical and UV wavelengths. In the first part of this paper,…
We investigate whether rings around extrasolar planets could be detected from those planets' transit lightcurves. To this end we develop a basic theoretical framework for calculating and interpreting the lightcurves of ringed planet…
Transit and radial velocity searches are two techniques for identifying nearby extrasolar planets to Earth that transit bright stars. Identifying a robust sample of these exoplanets around bright stars for detailed atmospheric…
Searching for transits provides a very promising technique for finding close-in extra-solar planets. Transiting planets present the advantage of allowing one to determine physical properties such as mass and radius unambiguously. The…
We investigate the prospects for characterizing extrasolar giant planets by measuring planetary oblateness from transit photometry and inferring planetary rotational periods. The rotation rates of planets in the solar system vary widely,…
Future high precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the nature of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light…
We typically measure the radii of transiting exoplanets from the transit depth, which is given by the ratio of cross-sectional areas of the planet and star. However, if a star has dark starspots (or bright regions) distributed throughout…
Hydrodynamical simulations of planet-disk interactions suggest that planets may be responsible for a number of the sub-structures frequently observed in disks in both scattered light and dust thermal emission. Despite the ubiquity of these…
GJ 1132b, which orbits an M dwarf, is one of the few known Earth-sized planets, and at 12 pc away it is one of the closest known transiting planets. Receiving roughly 19x Earth's insolation, this planet is too hot to be habitable but can…
Properties of planetary atmospheres, ionospheres, and magnetospheres are difficult to measure from Earth. Radio occultations are a common method for measuring these properties, but they traditionally rely on radio transmissions from a…
We quantify the effects of refraction in transit transmission spectroscopy on spectral absorption features and on temporal variations that could be used to obtain altitude-dependent spectra for planets orbiting stars of different stellar…
Main-sequence stars earlier than spectral type ~F6 or so are expected to rotate rapidly due to their radiative exteriors. This rapid rotation leads to an oblate stellar figure. It also induces the photosphere to be hotter (by up to several…
We present three-dimensional atmospheric circulation models of a hypothetical "warm Jupiter" planet, for a range of possible obliquities from 0-90 degrees. We model a Jupiter-mass planet on a 10-day orbit around a Sun-like star, since this…