Related papers: The Possible Moon of Kepler-90g is a False Positiv…

We examined which exo-systems contain moons that may be detected in transit. We numerically modeled transit light curves of Earth-like and giant planets that cointain moons with 0.005--0.4 Earth-mass. The orbital parameters were randomly…

If a transiting exoplanet has a moon, that moon could be detected directly from the transit it produces itself, or indirectly via the transit timing variations it produces in its parent planet. There is a range of parameter space where the…

The Kepler Mission is monitoring the brightness of ~150,000 stars searching for evidence of planetary transits. As part of the "Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler" (HEK) project, we report a planetary system with two confirmed planets and one…

Despite the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, no exomoons have been detected so far. We test a recently developed method for exomoon search, the orbital sampling effect (OSE), using the full exoplanet photometry from the Kepler Space…

Kepler-22b is the first transiting planet to have been detected in the habitable-zone of its host star. At 2.4 Earth radii, Kepler-22b is too large to be considered an Earth-analog, but should the planet host a moon large enough to maintain…

Exomoons represent a crucial missing puzzle piece in our efforts to understand extrasolar planetary systems. To address this deficiency, we here describe an exomoon survey of 70 cool, giant transiting exoplanet candidates found by Kepler.…

Never before has the detection and characterization of exoplanets via transit photometry been as promising and feasible as it is now, due to the increasing breadth and sensitivity of time domain optical surveys. Past works have made use of…

Two decades ago, empirical evidence concerning the existence and frequency of planets around stars, other than our own, was absent. Since this time, the detection of extrasolar planets from Jupiter-sized to most recently Earth-sized worlds…

Targeted observations of possible exomoon host systems will remain difficult to obtain and time-consuming to analyze in the foreseeable future. As such, time-domain surveys such as Kepler, K2 and TESS will continue to play a critical role…

In this paper we investigate the detectability of a habitable-zone exomoon around various configurations of exoplanetary systems with the Kepler Mission or photometry of approximately equal quality. We calculate both the predicted transit…

Discovering and characterizing exoplanets at the outer edge of the transit method's sensitivity has proven challenging owing to geometric biases and the practical difficulties associated with acquiring long observational baselines.…

Exomoons represent an outstanding challenge in modern astronomy, with the potential to provide rich insights into planet formation theory and habitability. In this work, we stack the phase-folded transits of 284 viable moon hosting Kepler…

The search for extrasolar planets is strongly motivated by the goal of characterizing how frequent habitable worlds and life may be within the Galaxy. Whilst much effort has been spent on searching for Earth-like planets, large moons may…

We describe a new metric that uses machine learning to determine if a periodic signal found in a photometric time series appears to be shaped like the signature of a transiting exoplanet. This metric uses dimensionality reduction and…

There are more than 200 moons in our Solar System, but their relatively small radii make similarly sized extrasolar moons very hard to detect with current instruments. The best exomoon candidates so far are two nearly Neptune-sized bodies…

Light curves from the Kepler Mission contain valuable information on the nature of the phenomena producing the transit-like signals. To assist in exploring the possibility that they are due to an astrophysical false positive, we describe a…

From the list of 2321 transiting planet candidates announced by the Kepler Mission, we select seven targets with favorable properties for the capacity to dynamically maintain an exomoon and present a detectable signal. These seven…

We present a survey of 41 Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs) for exomoons using Bayesian photodynamics, more than tripling the number of KOIs surveyed with this technique. We find no compelling evidence for exomoons although thirteen KOIs…

The Kepler-9 system harbors three known transiting planets. The system holds significant interest for several reasons. First, the outer two planets exhibit a period ratio that is close to a 2:1 orbital commensurability, with attendant…

Detections of massive extrasolar moons are shown feasible with the Kepler space telescope. Kepler's findings of about 50 exoplanets in the stellar habitable zone naturally make us wonder about the habitability of their hypothetical moons.…