Related papers: Transit Search from Antarctica and Chile - Compari…

With the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planetary system back to 1999, a great number of projects started to hunt for other similar systems. Because of the incidence rate of such systems was unknown and the length of the…

Context. Searching for planets in open clusters allows us to study the effects of dynamical environment on planet formation and evolution. Aims. Considering the strong dependence of planet frequency on stellar metallicity, we studied the…

The primary difficulty with using transits to discover extrasolar planets is the low probability a planet has of transiting its parent star. One way of overcoming this difficulty is to search for transits in dense stellar fields, such as…

The Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP) survey currently operates two installations, designated SuperWASP-N and SuperWASP-S, located in the northern and southern hemispheres respectively. These installations are designed to provide high…

We report site testing results obtained in night-time during the polar autumn and winter at Dome C. These results were collected during the first Concordia winterover by A. Agabi. They are based upon seeing and isoplanatic angle monitoring,…

We investigate the improved detection of extrasolar planets around eclipsing binaries using eclipse minima timing, and extrasolar moons around transiting planets using transit timing, offered by the upcoming COROT (ESA, 2005), Kepler (NASA,…

The transit method, during which a planet's presence is inferred by measuring the reduction in flux as it passes in front of its parent star, is a highly successful exoplanet detection and characterization technique. During transit, the…

The conventional observables to identify a habitable or inhabited environment in exoplanets, such as an ocean glint or abundant atmospheric O$_2$, will be challenging to detect with present or upcoming observatories. Here we suggest a new…

We present new transit light curves for planets in six extrasolar planetary systems. They were acquired with 0.4-2.2 m telescopes located in west Asia, Europe, and South America. When combined with literature data, they allowed us to…

The Atacama desert stands as the most arid, non-polar, region on Earth and has accommodated a considerable portion of the world's ground-based astronomical observatories for an extended period. The comprehension of factors important for…

Since its first discovery, most extrasolar planets were detected using radial velocity (RV) method. However, the RV method does not provide all parameters required to characterize a planetary system. Recently, Charbonneau et al.(2000) and…

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will enable the search for and characterization of terrestrial exoplanet atmospheres in the habitable zone via transmission spectroscopy. However, relatively little work has been done to use solar…

By targeting nearby M dwarfs, a transit search using modest equipment is capable of discovering planets as small as 2 Earth radii in the habitable zones of their host stars. The MEarth Project, a future transit search, aims to employ a…

One of the obstacles in the search for exoplanets via transits is the large number of candidates that must be followed up, few of which ultimately prove to be exoplanets. Any method that could make this process more efficient by somehow…

Over the past few years, astronomers have detected thousands of planets and candidate planets by observing their periodic transits in front of their host stars. Related methods might soon allow studies of the chemical imprints of life in…

Since the discovery of the first exoplanets more than 20 years ago, there has been an increasing need for photometric and spectroscopic models to characterize these systems. While imaging has been used extensively for Solar System bodies…

The SPECULOOS (Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars) project aims to detect temperate terrestrial planets transiting nearby ultracool dwarfs, including late M-dwarf stars and brown dwarfs, which are well-suited for…

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…

The WFIRST microlensing mission will measure precise light curves and relative parallaxes for millions of stars, giving it the potential to characterize short-period transiting planets all along the line of sight and into the galactic…

Prior to the 1990s, speculations about the occurrence of planets around other stars were based only on planet formation theory, observations of circumstellar disks, and the knowledge that at least one seemingly ordinary star is the host of…