Related papers: Modeling the Orbital Sampling Effect of Extrasolar…
We survey the methods proposed in the literature for detecting moons of extrasolar planets in terms of their ability to distinguish between prograde and retrograde moon orbits, an important tracer of moon formation channel. We find that…
The transit method, employed by MOST, \emph{Kepler}, and various ground-based surveys has enabled the characterization of extrasolar planets to unprecedented precision. These results are precise enough to begin to measure planet atmosphere…
Transmission spectroscopy during planetary transits, which is based on the measurements of the variations of planet-to-star radius ratio as a function of wavelength, is a powerful technique to study the atmospheric properties of transiting…
Observing system uncertainty experiments (OSUEs) have been recently proposed as a cost-effective way to perform probabilistic assessment of retrievals for NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission. One important component in the…
The fields of astronomy and astrophysics are currently engaged in an unprecedented era of discovery as recent missions have revealed thousands of exoplanets orbiting other stars. While the Kepler Space Telescope mission has enabled most of…
Non-Keplerian dynamics of planetary orbits manifest in the transit light-curve as variations of different types. In addition to Transit Timing Variations (TTV's), the shape of the transits contains additional information on variations in…
It has been posited that lunar eclipse observations may help predict the in-transit signature of Earth-like extrasolar planets. However, a comparative analysis of the two phenomena addressing in detail the transport of stellar light through…
There is a unique solution of the planet and star parameters from a planet transit light curve with two or more transits if the planet has a circular orbit and the light curve is observed in a band pass where limb darkening is negligible.…
The transit method is one of the most relevant exoplanet detection techniques, which consists of detecting periodic eclipses in the light curves of stars. This is not always easy due to the presence of noise in the light curves, which is…
Several studies have shown that stellar activity features, such as occulted and non-occulted starspots, can affect the measurement of transit parameters biasing studies of transit timing variations and transmission spectra. We present…
We investigated the potential of polarimetric observations in the optical wavelength range for the detection of exomoons and the characterization of exoplanet-exomoon systems. Using the three-dimensional Monte Carlo radiative transfer code…
We derive analytic, closed-form solutions for the light curve of a planet transiting a star with a limb darkening profile which is a polynomial function of the stellar elevation, up to arbitrary integer order. We provide improved analytic…
We consider the time-frequency analysis of a scattered light curve of a directly imaged exoplanet. We show that the geometric effect due to planetary obliquity and orbital inclination induce the frequency modulation of the apparent diurnal…
Until now, there is no confirmed moon beyond our solar system (exomoon). Exomoons offer us new possibly habitable places which might also be outside the classical habitable zone. But until now, the search for exomoons needs much…
Rapid planetary rotation can cause the equilibrium shape of a planet to be oblate. While planetary oblateness has mostly been probed by examining the subtle ingress and egress features in photometric transit light curves, we investigate the…
We investigate the influence of lunar-like satellites on the infrared orbital light curves of Earth-analog extra-solar planets. Such light curves will be obtained by NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) and ESA's Darwin missions as a…
Context: Detecting moons around exoplanets is a major goal of current and future observatories. Moons are suspected to influence rocky exoplanet habitability, and gaseous exoplanets in stellar habitable zones could harbour abundant and…
We present a new few-parameter phenomenological model of light curves of eclipsing binaries and stars with transiting planets that is able to fit the observed light curves with the accuracy better than 1\% of their amplitudes. The model can…
We present here the first release of the open-source python package ExoTETHyS, which aims to provide a stand-alone set of tools for modeling spectro-photometric observations of the transiting exoplanets. In particular, we describe: (1) a…
Clouds have been shown to be present in many exoplanetary atmospheres. Cloud formation modeling predicts considerable inhomogeneities of cloud cover, consistent with optical phase curve observations. However, optical phase curves cannot…