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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…
Under the current microlensing planet search strategy of monitoring events caused by stellar-mass lenses, only planets located within a narrow region of separations from central stars can be effectively detected. However, with the dramatic…
We introduce a new method of searching for and characterizing extra-solar planets. We show that by monitoring the center-of-light motion of microlensing alerts using the next generation of high precision astrometric instruments the…
Planets emit thermal radiation and reflect incident light that they recieve from their host stars. As a planet orbits it's host star the photometric variations associated with these two effects produce very similar phase curves. If observed…
Adding an independent estimate of the mean stellar density, $\rho_{\star}$, as a constraint in the analysis of stars that host transiting exoplanets can significantly improve the precision of the planet radius estimate in cases where the…
The escape fraction, fesc, of ionizing photons from early galaxies is a crucial parameter for determining whether the observed galaxies at z > 6 are able to reionize the high-redshift intergalactic medium. Previous attempts to measure fesc…
Improvements in the number of confirmed planets and the precision of observations imply a need to better understand subtle effects that may bias interpretations of exoplanet observations. One such effect is the distortion of a short period…
Detecting the faint emission of a secondary source in the proximity of the much brighter source has been the most severe obstacle for using direct imaging in searching for exoplanets. Using quantum state discrimination and quantum imaging…
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…
Transiting planet systems offer a unique opportunity to measure the masses and radii of many planets and their host stars. Yet, relative photometry and radial velocity measurements alone only constrain the density of the host star. In…
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:…
We exploit high quality photometry from the EVEREST pipeline to evaluate false-positive exoplanet candidates from the K2 mission. We compare the practical capabilities of EVEREST's pixel-level decorrelation scheme to the data analysis…
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,…
The properties of a transiting planet's host star are written in its transit light curve. The light curve can reveal the stellar density and the limb darkening profile in addition to the characteristics of the planet and its orbit. For…
Atmospheric spectroscopy provides a window into the properties of exoplanets. However, the physical interpretation of retrieved data and its implications for the internal properties of exoplanets remains nebulous. This letter addresses…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…
By means of high resolution hydrodynamical, three-dimensional calculations with nested-meshes, we evaluate the eccentricity reached by a low-mass, luminous planet embedded in an inviscid disc with constant thermal diffusivity and subjected…
Photometry of short-period planetary systems allows astronomers to monitor exoplanets, their host stars, and their mutual interactions. In addition to the transits of a planet in front of its star and the eclipses of the planet by its star,…
Stellar fundamental properties (masses, radii, effective temperatures) can be extracted from observations of eclipsing binary systems with remarkable precision, often better than 2%. Such precise measurements afford us the opportunity to…
We present an analysis on the detection viability of refraction effects in Kepler's exoplanet atmospheres using binning techniques for their light curves in order to compare against simulated refraction effects. We split the Kepler…