Related papers: A Cloaking Device for Transiting Planets
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
Observations of exoplanet transit spectra are essential to understanding the physics and chemistry of distant worlds. The effects of opacity sources and many physical processes combine to set the shape of a transit spectrum. Two such key…
When an extrasolar planet passes in front of its star (transits), its radius can be measured from the decrease in starlight and its orbital period from the time between transits. Multiple planets transiting the same star reveal more: period…
All transiting planets are at risk of contamination by blends with nearby, unresolved stars. Blends dilute the transit signal, causing the planet to appear smaller than it really is, or produce a false positive detection when the target…
The radial velocity technique is currently used to classify transiting objects. While capable of identifying grazing binary eclipses, this technique cannot reliably identify blends, a chance overlap of a faint background eclipsing binary…
As a planet transits the face of a star, it accelerates along the line-of-sight. The changing delay in the propagation of photons produces an apparent deceleration of the planet across the sky throughout the transit. This persistent…
We study the approximate cloaking via transformation optics for electromagnetic waves in the time harmonic regime in which the cloaking device {\it only} consists of a layer constructed by the mapping technique. Due to the fact that…
It is generally believed that transformation optics based cloaking, besides rendering the cloaked region invisible to detection by scattering of incident waves, also shields the region from those same waves. We demonstrate a coupling…
Traditional searches for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) or "technosignatures" focus on dedicated observations of single stars or regions in the sky to detect excess or transient emission from intelligent sources. The newest generation…
The Exoplanet Transmission Spectroscopy Imager (ETSI) amalgamates a low resolution slitless prism spectrometer with custom multi-band filters to simultaneously image 15 spectral bandpasses between 430 nm and 975 nm with an average spectral…
Land-based beacons, information laden probes sent into our solar system, and more distal communication nodes have each been proposed as the most likely means by which we might be contacted by ET. Each method, considered in isolation from…
The upcoming extremely large telescopes will provide the first opportunity to search for signs of habitability and life on non-transiting terrestrial exoplanets using high-contrast, high-resolution instrumentation. However, the suite of…
The Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment's Fourier Transform Spectrometer on the SCISAT satellite has been measuring infrared transmission spectra of Earth during Solar occultations since 2004. We use these data to build an infrared transit…
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…
Photometry of stars from the K2 extension of NASA's Kepler mission is afflicted by systematic effects caused by small (few-pixel) drifts in the telescope pointing and other spacecraft issues. We present a method for searching K2 light…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission measured light from stars in ~75% of the sky throughout its two year primary mission, resulting in millions of TESS 30-minute cadence light curves to analyze in the search for…
A planetary transit produces both a photometric signal and a spectroscopic signal. Precise observations of the transit light curve reveal the planetary radius and allow a search for timing anomalies caused by satellites or additional…
The majority of exoplanets found to date have been discovered via the transit method, and transmission spectroscopy represents the primary method of studying these distant worlds. Currently, in-depth atmospheric characterization of…
The reflected light signal from a planet throughout its orbit is a powerful probe of a planet's atmospheric properties. There are a number of planets that are amenable to reflected light phase curve studies with present and future…
Transits of bright stars offer a unique opportunity to study detailed properties of extrasolar planets that cannot be determined through radial-velocity observations. We propose a technique to find such systems using all-sky small-aperture…