Related papers: Detecting ring systems around exoplanets using hig…
Recently, the Kepler Space Telescope has detected several planets in orbit around a close binary star system. These so-called circumbinary planets will experience non-trivial spatial and temporal distributions of radiative flux on their…
Most extrasolar planets currently known were discovered by means of an indirect method that measures the stellar wobble caused by the planet. We previously studied a triple system composed of a star and a nearby binary on circular coplanar…
With the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the search for planets like Earth and life in the universe, is quickly gaining momentum. In the future, large space observatories could directly detect the light scattered from…
The radius of a planet is a fundamental parameter that probes its composition and habitability. Precise radius measurements are typically derived from the fraction of starlight blocked when a planet transits its host star. The wide-field…
We consider strong gravitational lensing by nearby stars. Using our wave-optical treatment of lensing phenomena, we study Einstein rings that may form around nearby stellar lenses. It is remarkable that these rings are bright and large…
Planetary rings produce a distinct shape distortion in transit lightcurves. However, to accurately model such lightcurves the observations need to cover the entire transit, especially ingress and egress, as well as an out-of-transit…
We present here the first observationally based determination of the rate of occurrence of circumbinary planets. This is derived from the publicly available Kepler data, using an automated search algorithm and debiasing process to produce…
Several celestial bodies in co-orbital configurations exist in the solar system. However, co-orbital exoplanets have not yet been discovered. This lack may result from a degeneracy between the signal induced by co-orbital planets and other…
Astronomy is at times a science of unexpected discovery. When it is, and if we are lucky, new intellectual territories emerge to challenge our views of the cosmos. The recent indirect detections using high-precision Doppler spectroscopy of…
By design, model-based approaches for flagging transiting exoplanets in light curves, such as boxed least squares, excel at detecting planets with low S/N at the expense of finding signals that are not well described by the assumed model,…
To maximize the number of planet detections by increasing efficiency, current microlensing follow-up observation experiments are focusing on high-magnification events to search for planet-induced perturbations near the peak of lensing light…
High-contrast imaging surveys for exoplanet detection have shown giant planets at large separations to be rare. It is important to push towards detections at smaller separations, the part of the parameter space containing most planets. The…
Context. The extremely low density of several long-period exoplanets in mature systems is still unexplained -- with HIP 41378 f being archetypical of this category. It has been proposed that such planets could actually have normal densities…
In our solar system, the presence of rings is exclusive to the gas giants, but is this the case for all planetary systems? In principle, it seems that rocky exoplanets could also have rings, which could be searched for by studying their…
Several exoplanets have been detected towards the Galactic bulge with the microlensing technique. We show that exoplanets in M31 may also be detected with the pixel-lensing method, if telescopes making high cadence observations of an…
We consider an alternative to the cross-correlation function (CCF), that uses the autocor- relation function (ACF), to measure in spectra the reflected light of the stars by their planetary companion. The objective of this work is to assess…
Planet perturbations are often invoked as a potential explanation for many spatial structures that have been imaged in debris discs. So far this issue has been mostly investigated with collisionless N-body numerical models. We numerically…
There are growing amount of very high-resolution polarized scattered light images of circumstellar disks. Nascent giant planets planets are surrounded by their own circumplanetary disks which may scatter and polarize both the planetary and…
A close-in giant planetary (CGP) system has a net polarization signal whose value varies depending on the orbital phase of the planet. This polarization signal is either caused by the stellar occultation or by reflected starlight from the…
Most planetary discoveries with the K2 and TESS missions are restricted to short periods because of the limited duration of observation. However, the re-observation of sky area allows for the detection of longer period planets. We describe…