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NASA's re-purposed Kepler mission -- dubbed K2 -- has brought new scientific opportunities that were not anticipated for the original Kepler mission. One science goal that makes optimal use of K2's capabilities, in particular its 360-degree…
The Kepler spacecraft, whose single instrument was a 0.95 m diameter wide-field telescope, operated in a heliocentric orbit for nearly a decade, returning a wealth of data that have revolutionized exoplanet science. Kepler data have been…
The astrometry technique is an important tool for detecting and characterizing exoplanets of different type. In this review, the different projects which are either operating, in construction or in discussion are presented and their…
We present the ground-based activities within the different working groups of the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC). The activities aim at the systematic characterization of the 5000+ KASC targets, and at the collection of…
Three transiting exoplanet candidate stars were discovered in a ground-based photometric survey prior to the launch of NASA's {\it Kepler} mission. {\it Kepler} observations of them were obtained during Quarter 1 of the {\it Kepler}…
The Kepler Mission has discovered thousands of exoplanets and revolutionized our understanding of their population. This large, homogeneous catalog of discoveries has enabled rigorous studies of the occurrence rate of exoplanets and…
We demonstrate that gravitational lensing can be used to discover and study planets in the habitable zones of nearby dwarf stars. If appropriate software is developed, a new generation of monitoring programs will automatically conduct a…
This paper is devoted to exploring how we can discover and study nearby (< 1-2 kpc) planetary and binary systems by observing their action as gravitational lenses. Lensing can extend the realm of nearby binaries and planets that can be…
Solar-like oscillations in red-giant stars are now commonly detected in thousands of stars with space telescopes such as the NASA Kepler mission. Parallel radial velocity and photometric measurements would help to better understand the…
Astrophysics lies at the crossroads of big datasets (such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and Gaia), open source software to visualize and interpret high dimensional datasets (such as Glue, WorldWide Telescope, and OpenSpace), and…
The most successful method used so far to search for extrasolar planets is the radial velocity technique, where periodical shifts on the measured emission from a star provide evidence for an orbiting planet. This method has been used on…
The analysis and an efficient scientific exploration of the Digital Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (DPOSS) represents a major technical challenge. The input data set consists of 3 Terabytes of pixel information, and contains a few billion…
The Kepler mission has discovered over 2500 exoplanet candidates in the first two years of spacecraft data, with approximately 40% of them in candidate multi-planet systems. The high rate of multiplicity combined with the low rate of…
The discovery of extra-solar planets is arguably the most exciting development in astrophysics during the past 15 years, rivalled only by the detection of dark energy. Two projects unite the communities of exoplanet scientists and…
The Collaboration for Astronomy Signal Processing and Electronics Research (CASPER) has been working for a decade to reduce the time and cost of designing, building and deploying new digital radio-astronomy instruments. Today, CASPER…
Binary stars are crucial laboratories for stellar physics, so have been photometric targets for space missions beginning with the very first orbiting telescope (OAO-2) launched in 1968. This review traces the binary stars observed and the…
Asteroseismology involves probing the interiors of stars and quantifying their global properties, such as radius and age, through observationsof normal modes of oscillation. The technical requirements for conducting asteroseismology include…
For centuries, astronomers have discussed the possibility of inhabited worlds - from Herschel's 18th-century observations suggesting Mars may host life, to the systematic search for technosignatures that began in the 1960s using radio…
The Kepler survey has provided a wealth of astrophysical knowledge by continuously monitoring over 150,000 stars. The resulting database contains thousands of examples of known variability types and at least as many that cannot be…
We propose using large Air Cerenkov Telescopes (ACT's) to search for optical, pulsed signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence. Such dishes collect tens of photons from a nanosecond-scale pulse of isotropic equivalent power of tens of…