Related papers: Inferring asymmetric limb cloudiness on exoplanets…
Planets emit thermal radiation and reflect incident light that they recieve from their host stars. As a planet orbits it's host star the photometric variations associated with these two effects produce very similar phase curves. If observed…
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…
Rings around exoplanets (exorings) are one of the most expected discoveries in exoplanetary research. There is an increasing number of theoretical and observational efforts for detecting exorings, but none of them have succeeded yet. Most…
The measurement of an exoplanet's oblateness and obliquity provides insights into the planet's internal structure and formation history. Previous work using small differences in the shape of the transit light curve has been moderately…
One of the main endeavors of the field of exoplanetary sciences is the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres on a population level. The current method of choice to accomplish this task is transmission spectroscopy, where the apparent…
Exoplanet atmospheres are the key to understanding the nature of exoplanets. To this end, transit spectrophotometry provides us opportunities to investigate the physical properties and chemical compositions of exoplanet atmospheres. We aim…
An exoplanet-exomoon system presents a superposition of phase curves to observers - the dominant component varies according to the planetary period, and the lesser varies according to both the planetary and the lunar period. If the spectra…
Aims. We used realistic three-dimensional (3D) radiative hydrodynamical (RHD) simulations from the Stagger-grid and synthetic images computed with the radiative transfer code Optim3D to provide interferometric observables to extract the…
With over 1800 planets discovered outside of the Solar System in the past two decades, the field of exoplanetology has broadened our perspective on planetary systems. Research priorities are now moving from planet detection to planet…
We present an analysis of the early Kepler observations of the previously discovered transiting planet HAT-P-7b. The light curve shows the transit of the star, the occultation of the planet, and the orbit phase-dependent light from the…
Future telescopes will characterize rocky exoplanets in reflected light, revealing their albedo, which depends on surface, cloud, and atmospheric properties. Identifying these features is crucial for assessing habitability. We present…
We present a methodology to discover outliers in catalogs of periodic light-curves. We use cross-correlation as measure of ``similarity'' between two individual light-curves and then classify light-curves with lowest average ``similarity''…
Examining reflected light from exoplanets aids in our understanding of the scattering properties of their atmospheres and will be a primary task of future flagship space- and ground-based telescopes. We introduce an enhanced capability of…
The photometric transit method has been the most effective method to detect and characterize exoplanets as several ground-based as well as space-based survey missions have discovered thousands of exoplanets using this method. With the…
The Kepler mission, despite its conclusion over a decade ago, continues to offer a rich dataset for uncovering new astrophysical objects and phenomena. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive search for exocometary transit signatures…
Many of the directly imaged self-luminous gas giant exoplanets have been found to have cloudy atmospheres. Scattering of the emergent thermal radiation from these planets by the dust grains in their atmospheres should locally give rise to…
We investigate the prospects for characterizing extrasolar giant planets by measuring planetary oblateness from transit photometry and inferring planetary rotational periods. The rotation rates of planets in the solar system vary widely,…
One of the simplest ways to identify an exoplanetary transit is to phase fold a photometric time series upon a trial period - leading to a coherent stack when using the correct value. Such phase-folded transits have become a standard data…
Exoplanet habitability is traditionally assessed by comparing a planet's semi-major axis to the location of its host star's "habitable zone," the shell around a star for which Earth-like planets can possess liquid surface water. The Kepler…
Extremely large telescopes (ELTs) provide an opportunity to observe surface inhomogeneities for ultracool objects including M dwarfs, brown dwarfs (BDs), and gas giant planets via Doppler imaging and spectro-photometry techniques. These…