Related papers: Planet transit and stellar granulation detection w…
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…
We review the state of the art in follow-up photometry for planetary transit searches. Three topics are discussed: (1) Photometric monitoring of planets discovered by radial velocity to detect possible transits (2) Follow-up photometry of…
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,…
We present theoretical analysis of the astrometric searches for extrasolar planets with the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). Particularly, we derive a model for the future measurements with SIM and discuss the problem of reliable…
An overview is given of the Permanent All Sky Survey (PASS) project. The primary goal of PASS is the detection of all transiting giant planets in the entire sky, complete for stellar systems of magnitudes ~ 5.5-10.5. Since the sample stars…
Detecting and confirming terrestrial planets is incredibly difficult due to their tiny size and mass relative to Sun-like host stars. However, recent instrumental advancements are making the detection of Earth-like exoplanets…
The characterization of extrasolar earth-like atmospheres for biosignatures remains one of the most compelling and elusive challenges in astronomy. Coronagraphy, nulling interferometry and free-flying occulters have been advanced as…
High-precision stellar analyses require hydrodynamic 3D modeling. Such models predict changes across stellar disks of spectral line shapes, asymmetries, and wavelength shifts. For testing models in stars other than the Sun, spatially…
With the advent of optical interferometers that will be coming online in the next decade, radial velocity searches for extra-solar planets will be complemented by high angular resolution astrometric measurements. In this paper, we explore…
We report high precision, high cadence photometric measurements of the star HD 209458, which is known from radial velocity measurements to have a planetary mass companion in a close orbit. We detect two separate transit events at times that…
Nearly everything we know about extrasolar planets to date comes from optical astronomy. While exoplanetary aurorae are predicted to be bright at low radio frequencies (< 1 GHz), we consider the effect of an exoplanet transit on radio…
The detection of extrasolar planets' atmospheres requires very demanding observations. For planets that can not be spatially separated from their host stars, i.e. the vast majority of planets, the transiting planets are the only ones…
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…
We perform a series of time dependent Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the HD 189733 star-planet system in order to predict radio transit modulations due to the interaction between the stellar wind and planetary magnetic field. The…
Red supergiants are massive evolved stars that contribute extensively to the chemical enrichment of our Galaxy. It has been shown that convection in those stars gives rise to large granules that cause surface inhomogeneities and shock waves…
The detection of thousands of extrasolar planets by the transit method naturally raises the question of whether potential extrasolar observers could detect the transits of the Solar System planets. We present a comprehensive analysis of the…
To date, infrared interferometry at best achieved contrast ratios of a few times $10^{-4}$ on bright targets. GRAVITY, with its dual-field mode, is now capable of high contrast observations, enabling the direct observation of exoplanets. We…
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…
Over the course of the past decade, advances in the radial velocity and transit techniques have enabled the detection of rocky exoplanets in the habitable zones of nearby stars. Future observations with novel methods are required to…
By means of numerical experiments we explore the application of interferometry to the detection and characterization of abundance spots in chemically peculiar (CP) stars using the brightest star eps~Uma as a case study. We find that the…