Related papers: Transit Search from Antarctica and Chile - Compari…
In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…
A promising method to detect earth-sized exoplanets is the timing analysis of a known transit. The technique allows a search for variations in transit duration or center induced by the perturbation of a third body, e.g. a second planet or…
Searching for transit timing variations in the known transiting exoplanet systems can reveal the presence of other bodies in the system. Here we report such searches for two transiting exoplanet systems, TrES-1 and WASP-2. Their new…
Surveys provide a wealth of data to the astronomical community that are used well after their completion. In this paper, we propose a project that would take the maximum benefit of Dome C in Antarctica by performing two surveys, in the…
We present the results of a site characterization study carried out at the Astronomical Observatory of the Autonomous Region of the Aosta Valley (OAVdA), in the Western Italian Alps, aimed at establishing its potential to host a photometric…
A promising method for detecting earth-sized exoplanets is the timing analysis of a known transit. The technique allows a search for variations in either the transit duration or the center induced by the perturbation of a third body, e.g. a…
Dome A in Antarctica has been demonstrated to be the best site on earth for optical, infrared, and terahertz astronomical observations by more and more evidence, such as excellent free-atmosphere seeing, extremely low perceptible water…
The ASTEP (Antarctica Search for Transiting ExoPlanets) program was originally aimed at probing the quality of the Dome C, Antarctica for the discovery and characterization of exoplanets by photometry. In the first year of operation of the…
Detecting the presence of circumstellar dust around nearby solar-type main sequence stars is an important pre-requisite for the design of future life-finding space missions such as ESA's Darwin or NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF). The…
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…
Transiting planet systems offer an unique opportunity to observationally constrain proposed models of the interiors (radius, composition) and atmospheres (chemistry, dynamics) of extrasolar planets. The spectacular successes of ground-based…
A prototype system for the Permanent All Sky Survey (PASS) project is presented. PASS is a continuous photometric survey of the entire celestial sphere with a high temporal resolution. Its major objectives are the detection of all…
Open clusters potentially provide an ideal environment for the search for transiting extrasolar planets since they feature a relatively large number of stars of the same known age and metallicity at the same distance. With this motivation,…
The evaluation of sky characteristics plays a fundamental role for many astrophysical experiments and ground-based observations. In solar physics, the main requirement for such observations is a very low sky brightness value, that is, less…
At an altitude of 3250m and at a latitude of $75^\circ$S, the Italo-French Concordia station was open to winter-over teams in 2005. It is one of the high points of the Antarctic polar plateau. These extreme remote sites are expected to…
We obtained J-, H- and JH-band photometry of known extrasolar planet transiting systems at the 2.1-m Kitt Peak National Observatory Telescope using the FLAMINGOS infrared camera between October 2008 and October 2011. From the derived…
We conducted a global analysis of the TRAPPIST Ultra-Cool Dwarf Transit Survey - a prototype of the SPECULOOS transit search conducted with the TRAPPIST-South robotic telescope in Chile from 2011 to 2017 - to estimate the occurrence rate of…
Cosmic shear offers a remarkbly clean way to measure the equation of state of the Universe and its evolution. Resolution over a wide field is paramount, and Antarctica offers unique possibilities in this respect. There is an order of…
Wide-field rapid sky surveys serve as critical observational methods for time-domain astronomical research. The Antarctic region, with several months of continuous dark nights annually, is an ideal site for time-domain astronomical…
We present first results from the Survey for Transiting Extrasolar Planets in Stellar Systems (STEPSS). Our goal is to assess the frequency of close-in extrasolar planets around main-sequence stars in several open clusters. By concentrating…