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Tidal interaction between an exoplanet and its host star is a possible pathway to transfer angular momentum between the planetary orbit and the stellar spin. In cases where the planetary orbital period is shorter than the stellar rotation…
Stars appear darker at their limbs than at their disk centers because at the limb we are viewing the higher and cooler layers of stellar photospheres. Limb darkening derived from state-of-the-art stellar atmosphere models systematically…
The presence of giant gaseous planets that reside in close proximity to their host stars may be a consequence of large-scale radial migration through the proto-planetary nebulae. Within the context of this picture, significant orbital…
Exoplanets are organized in a broad array of orbital configurations that reflect their formation along with billions of years of dynamical processing through gravitational interactions. This history is encoded in the angular momentum…
Secular resonances in exoplanet systems occur when two or more planets have commensurabilities in the precession rates of their orbital elements, causing an exchange of angular momentum between them. The stellar gravitational quadrupole…
Gravity darkening induced by rapid stellar rotation provides us with a unique opportunity to characterize the spin-orbit misalignment of a planetary system through analysis of its photometric transit. We use the gravity-darkened transit…
The stellar spin orientation relative to the orbital planes of multiplanet systems are becoming accessible to observations. Here, we analyze and classify different types of spin-orbit evolution in compact multiplanet systems perturbed by an…
Although close-orbiting, massive exoplanets -- known as hot and warm Jupiters -- are among the most observationally accessible known planets, their formation pathways are still not universally agreed upon. One method to constrain the…
High-energy observations of the Sun provide an opportunity to test the limits of our ability to accurately measure properties of transiting exoplanets in the presence of stellar activity. Here we insert transits of a hot Jupiter into…
We report the detection of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect for the eccentric, super-Neptune exoplanet HAT-P-11b, based on radial velocity measurements taken with HDS mounted on the Subaru 8.2m telescope, and simultaneous photometry with the…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin effect allows us to measure the projected stellar obliquity of exoplanets. From the spin-orbit alignment, planet formation and migration theories can be tested to improve our understanding of the currently observed…
The orbital parameters of extra-solar planets have a significant impact on the probability that the planet will transit the host star. This was recently demonstrated by the transit detection of HD 17156b whose favourable eccentricity and…
The ability to observe extrasolar planets transiting their stars has profoundly changed our understanding of these planetary systems. However, these measurements depend on how well we understand the properties of the host star, such as…
Planet formation is often considered in the context of one circumstellar disk around one star. Yet stellar binary systems are ubiquitous, and thus a substantial fraction of all potential planets must form and evolve in more complex,…
The orientation between a star's spin axis and a planet's orbital plane provides valuable information about the system's formation and dynamical history. For non-transiting planets at wide separations, true stellar obliquities are…
Stellar obliquities, or spin-orbit angles, prevalent in exoplanet systems, can impose important constraints on their formation and evolution histories. Recent studies suggest that primordial misalignments between protoplanetary disks and…
We investigate the linear polarization in the light of extrasolar planetary systems that may arise as a result of an occultation of the star by a transiting planet. Such an occultation breaks any spherical symmetry over the projected…
The disciplines of asteroseismology and extrasolar planet science overlap methodically in the branch of high-precision photometric time series observations. Light curves are, amongst others, useful to measure intrinsic stellar variability…
We present the analysis of 4 months of Kepler photometry of the K4V star HAT-P-11, including 26 transits of its "super-Neptune" planet. The transit data exhibit numerous anomalies that we interpret as passages of the planet over dark…
The occultation of background stars by foreground Solar system objects, such as planets and asteroids, has been widely used as an observational probe to study physical properties associated with the foreground sample. Similarly, the…