Related papers: Detecting Exomoons Around Self-luminous Giant Exop…
We examined which exo-systems contain moons that may be detected in transit. We numerically modeled transit light curves of Earth-like and giant planets that cointain moons with 0.005--0.4 Earth-mass. The orbital parameters were randomly…
Context. The photometric signal we receive from a star hosting a planet is modulated by the variation of the planet signal with its orbital phase. Such phase variations are observed for transiting hot Jupiters with current instrumentation,…
We study the impact of gas motions on the polarization of bright X-ray emission lines from the hot intercluster medium (ICM). The polarization naturally arises from resonant scattering of emission lines owing to a quadrupole component in…
The search for extrasolar rocky planets has already found the first transiting rocky super-Earth, Corot 7b, with a surface temperature that allows for magma oceans. Here we ask if we could distinguish rocky planets with recent major…
Polarized dust emission outside of disks reveal the magnetic field morphology of molecular clouds. Within disks, however, polarized dust emission can arise from very different mechanisms (e.g., self-scattering), and each of them are useful…
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 presence of rings and moons around exoplanets is likely to be one of the next great discoveries in exoplanet research. Using theories developed for the Solar System, we explore the possibility of coupled ring-moon cycles around…
Rings around giant exoplanets (hereafter 'exorings') are still a missing planetary phenomenon among the vast number of discovered planets. Despite the fact there exist a large number of methods for identifying and characterizing these…
We present a way of searching for non-transiting exoplanets with dusty tails. In the transiting case, the extinction by dust during the transit removes more light from the beam than is scattered into it. Thus, the forward scattering…
Characterization of exoplanets has matured in recent years, particularly through studies of exoplanetary atmospheres of transiting planets at infra-red wavelenegths. The primary source for such observations has been the Spitzer Space…
The detectability of moons of extra-solar planets is investigated, focussing on the time-of-arrival perturbation technique, a method for detecting moons of pulsar planets, and the photometric transit timing technique, a method for detecting…
With the increasing number of directly imaged giant exoplanets the current atmosphere models are often not capable of fully explaining the spectra and luminosity of the sources. A particularly challenging component of the atmosphere models…
The discovery of rings around extrasolar planets ("exorings") is one of the next breakthroughs in exoplanetary research. Previous studies have explored the feasibility of detecting exorings with present and future photometric sensitivities…
Most detected transiting planets have orbits which would fit within the one of Mercury, exposing them to intense stellar irradiation and interactions that significantly alter their properties. In contrast, colder planets with longer orbital…
The best-characterized exoplanets to date are planets on close-in transiting orbits around their host stars. The high level of irradiation and transiting geometry of these objects make them ideal targets for atmospheric investigations.…
Direct imaging has paved the way for atmospheric characterization of young and self-luminous gas giants. Scattering in a horizontally-inhomogeneous atmosphere causes the disk-integrated polarization of the thermal radiation to be linearly…
In the near-future, dedicated telescopes observe Earth-like exoplanets in reflected light, allowing their characterization. Because of the huge distances, every exoplanet will be a single pixel, but temporal variations in its spectral flux…
More than 200 moons exist in our Solar System, yet no exomoon has been confirmed to date. While the innermost two planets of the Solar System lack natural satellites and most studies favour the existence of exomoons around long-period…
Close-in giant planets represent the most significant evidence of planetary migration. If large exomoons form around migrating giant planets which are more stable (e.g. those in the Solar System), what happens to these moons after migration…
We demonstrate the ability of existing and planned telescopes, on the ground and in space, to directly image tidally heated exomoons orbiting gas-giant exoplanets. Tidally heated exomoons can plausibly be far more luminous than their host…