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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 Kepler mission provides an exciting opportunity to study the lightcurves of stars with unprecedented precision and continuity of coverage. This is the first look at a large sample of stars with photometric data of a quality that has…
Obtaining measurements of chromospheric and photometric activity of stars with near-solar fundamental parameters and rotation periods is important for a better understanding of solar-stellar connection. We select a sample of 2603 stars with…
In the exoplanetary era, the Kepler spacecraft is causing a revolution by discovering thousands of new planet candidates. However, a follow up program is needed in order to reject false candidates and to fully characterize the bona-fide…
Setting the timeline of the events which shaped the Milky Way disc through its 13 billion year old history is one of the major challenges in the theory of galaxy formation. Achieving this goal is possible using late-type stars, which in…
There is an opportunity to advance both solar system and extrasolar planetary studies that does not require the construction of new telescopes or new missions but better use and access to inter-disciplinary data sets. This approach…
The Kepler mission discovered 2842 exoplanet candidates with 2 years of data. We provide updates to the Kepler planet candidate sample based upon 3 years (Q1-Q12) of data. Through a series of tests to exclude false-positives, primarily…
We present the motivation for and the first results from a large radial velocity search for planets around red giants with the 9.2-m Hobby-Eberly Telescope.
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…
The ongoing microlensing searches have generated more photometric measurements of pulsating stars than all previous observing projects combined. In particular, OGLE has made ~ 340,000 B, V, and I-band measurements of ~ 1,300 Cepheids in the…
The Kepler Mission seeks to detect Earth-size planets transiting solar-like stars in its ~115 deg^2 field of view over the course of its 3.5 year primary mission by monitoring the brightness of each of ~156,000 Long Cadence stellar targets…
For centuries, the rich nocturnal environment of the starry sky could be modelled only by analogue tools such as paper planispheres, atlases, globes and numerical tables. The immersive sky simulator of the twentieth century, the…
Large-scale photometric surveys are revolutionizing astronomy by delivering unprecedented amounts of data. The rich data sets from missions such as the NASA Kepler and TESS satellites, and the upcoming ESA PLATO mission, are a treasure…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence by looking for signals from advanced technological civilizations has been ongoing for some decades. We suggest that it could possibly be made more efficient by focusing on stars from which the…
As the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) fulfills its primary mission it is executing an unprecedented all-sky survey with the potential to discover distant planets in our own solar system, as well as hundreds of…
The Kepler telescope has discovered over 4,000 planets (candidates) by searching ? 200,000 stars over a wide range of distance (order of kpc) in our Galaxy. Characterizing the kinematic properties (e.g., Galactic component membership and…
In the last decade, over a million stars were monitored to detect transiting planets. Manual interpretation of potential exoplanet candidates is labor intensive and subject to human error, the results of which are difficult to quantify.…
We outline the purpose, strategy and first results of a deep, high cadence, photometric survey of the Kepler field using the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma and the MDM 1.3m Telescope on Kitt Peak. Our goal was to identify sources…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly…
Kepler's quest for other Earths need not end just yet: it remains capable of characterizing cool Earth-mass planets by microlensing, even given its degraded pointing control. If Kepler were pointed at the Galactic bulge, it could conduct a…