Related papers: Development and Application of Tools to Characteri…
Transmission spectroscopy during planetary transits is expected to be a major source of information on the atmospheres of small (approximately Earth-sized) exoplanets in the next two decades. This technique, however, is intrinsically…
The fine precision of photometric data available from missions like Kepler provide researchers with the ability to measure changes in light on the order of tens of parts per million (ppm). This level of precision allows researchers to…
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…
We investigate the effect of planetary rotation on the transit spectrum of an extrasolar giant planet. During ingress and egress, absorption features arising from the planet's atmosphere are Doppler shifted by of order the planet's…
The past two decades have seen a significant advancement in the detection, classification and understanding of exoplanets and binaries. This is due, in large part, to the increase in use of small-aperture telescopes (< 20 cm) to survey…
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…
As part of our ongoing effort to investigate transit timing variations (TTVs) of known exoplanets, we monitored transits of the four exoplanets HAT-P-18b, HAT-P-19b, HAT-P-27b/WASP-40b and WASP-21b. All of them are suspected to show TTVs…
Exoplanet transmission spectra, which measure the absorption of light passing through a planet's atmosphere during transit, are most often assessed globally, resulting in a single spectrum per planetary atmosphere. However, the inherent…
We update the fundamental physical and orbital properties of the transiting hot-Saturn type exoplanet HAT-P-19b and its host star HAT-P-19 as a result of the global modeling of our high-precision transit light curves, an archive spectrum,…
Survey strategies for upcoming exoplanet direct imaging missions have considered varying assumptions of prior knowledge. Precursor radial velocity surveys could have detected nearby exo-Earths and provided prior orbit and mass constraints.…
Transmission spectroscopy can be used to constrain the properties of exoplanetary atmospheres. During a transit, the light blocked from the atmosphere of the planet leaves an imprint in the light coming from the star. This has been shown…
The presence of silicate material in known rings in the Solar System raises the possibility of ring systems existing even within the snow line -- where most transiting exoplanets are found. Previous studies have shown that the detection of…
We describe a project (transitsearch.org) currently attempting to discover transiting intermediate-period planets orbiting bright parent stars, and we simulate that project's performance. The discovery of such a transit would be an…
We present a detection criterion for exo-planets to be used with the space mission COROT. This criterion is based on the transit method, which suggests the observation of star dimming caused by partial occulations by planetary companions.…
The XO project aims at detecting transiting exoplanets around bright stars from the ground using small telescopes. The original configuration of XO (McCullough et al. 2005) has been changed and extended as described here. The instrumental…
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,…
CONTEXT: High-precision stellar analyses require hydrodynamic modeling to interpret chemical abundances or oscillation modes. Exoplanet atmosphere studies require stellar background spectra to be known along the transit path while detection…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has been designed in order to satisfy several different scientific objectives that can be addressed by a ten-year synoptic sky survey. However, LSST will also provide a large amount of data that…
We report the results of a prototype photometric search for transiting extrasolar planets using Subaru Suprime-Cam. Out of about 100,000 stars monitored around the Galactic plane (l=90 degree,b=0 degree), we find that 7,700 (27,000) stars…
Precise exoplanet characterization requires precise classification of exoplanet host stars. The masses of host stars are commonly estimated by comparing their spectra to those predicted by stellar evolution models. However,…