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Since planets were first discovered outside our own Solar System in 1992 (around a pulsar) and in 1995 (around a main sequence star), extrasolar planet studies have become one of the most dynamic research fields in astronomy. Now that more…
Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in…
In recent years the number of exoplanets has grown considerably. The most successful techniques in these detections are the radial velocity (RV) and planetary transits techniques, the latter significantly advanced by the Kepler, K2 and,…
The upcoming TESS mission is expected to find thousands of transiting planets around bright stars, yet for three-quarters of the fields observed the temporal coverage will limit discoveries to planets with orbital periods below 13.7 days.…
Due to the efforts by numerous ground-based surveys and NASA's Kepler and TESS, there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of transiting exoplanets ideal for atmospheric characterization via spectroscopy with large platforms such as JWST and…
Occultation light curves of exomoons may give information on their albedo and hence indicate the presence of ice cover on the surface. Icy moons might have subsurface oceans thus these may potentially be habitable. The objective of our…
We investigate whether rings around extrasolar planets could be detected from those planets' transit lightcurves. To this end we develop a basic theoretical framework for calculating and interpreting the lightcurves of ringed planet…
Direct imaging is a powerful exoplanet discovery technique that is complementary to other techniques and offers great promise in the era of 30 meter class telescopes. Space-based transit surveys have revolutionized our understanding of the…
The yield of Earth-like planets will likely be a primary science metric for future space-based missions that will drive telescope aperture size. Maximizing the exoEarth candidate yield is therefore critical to minimizing the required…
We present results from a search for additional transiting planets in 24 systems already known to contain a transiting planet. We model the transits due to the known planet in each system and subtract these models from lightcurves obtained…
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…
We evaluate gravitational lensing as a technique for the detection of extrasolar moons. Since 2004 gravitational microlensing has been successfully applied as a detection method for extrasolar planets. In principle, the method is sensitive…
Photometric follow-ups of transiting exoplanets (TEPs) may lead to discoveries of additional, less massive bodies in extrasolar systems. This is possible by detecting and then analysing variations in transit timing of transiting exoplanets.…
Of the known transiting extra-solar planets, a few have been detected through photometric follow-up observations of radial velocity planets. Perhaps the best known of these is the transiting exoplanet HD 209458b. For hot Jupiters (periods…
The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) will make precise astrometric measurements that can be used to detect planets around nearby stars. We have simulated SIM observations and estimated the ability of SIM to detect planets with given…
We study the statistical characteristics of a box-fitting algorithm to analyze stellar photometric time series in the search for periodic transits by extrasolar planets. The algorithm searches for signals characterized by a periodic…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright stars with Ic<13. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2018 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission, and is expected to discover a thousand or…
We present an efficient analytical method to predict the maximum transit timing variations of a circumbinary exoplanet, given some basic parameters of the host binary. We derive an analytical model giving limits on the potential location of…
We describe the Pan-STARRS Moving Object Processing System (MOPS), a modern software package that produces automatic asteroid discoveries and identifications from catalogs of transient detections from next-generation astronomical survey…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…