Related papers: Can stellar activity make a planet seem misaligned…
The Einstein rings and proper motions of nearby stars tend to be large. Thus, every year some foreground stars within a few hundred parsecs of Earth induce gravitational lensing events in background stars. In some of these cases, the events…
I model the effect of rapid stellar rotation on a planet's insolation. Fast-rotating stars have induced pole-to-equator temperature gradients (known as gravity-darkening) of up to several thousand Kelvin that affect the star's luminosity…
We measure the sky-projected stellar obliquities (\lambda) in the multiple-transiting planetary systems KOI-94 and Kepler-25, using the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect. In both cases the host stars are well-aligned with the orbital planes of the…
Future generations of precise radial velocity (RV) surveys aim to achieve sensitivity sufficient to detect Earth mass planets orbiting in their stars' habitable zones. A major obstacle to this goal is astrophysical radial velocity noise…
In eclipsing binaries the stellar rotation of the two components will cause a rotational Doppler beaming during eclipse ingress and egress when only part of the eclipsed component is covered. For eclipsing binaries with fast spinning…
Short-period exoplanets may exhibit orbital precession driven by several different processes, including tidal interactions with their host stars and secular interactions with additional planets. This motion manifests as periodic shifts in…
The alignment of planetary orbits with respect to the stellar rotation preserves information on their dynamical histories. Measuring this angle for young planets help illuminate the mechanisms that create misaligned orbits for older…
When a planet occults a spotty area on a stellar surface, the flux increases and a characteristic feature in a light curve - a bump - is observed. Among the planets detected by the CoRoT-mission CoRoT-18 is especially interesting as it…
Recent analyses of low-mass eclipsing binary stars have unveiled a significant disagreement between the observations and the predictions of stellar structure models. Results show that theoretical models underestimate the radii and…
The Kepler space mission has detected a large number of exoplanets in multiple transiting planet systems. Previous studies found that these Kepler multiple planet systems exhibit an intra-system uniformity, namely planets in the same system…
Galactic microlensing has the capability to determine the position angle of the detected planets in a sky reference frame. By a broad enough statistics, it is possible to investigate possible anisotropies in the distribution of the orbital…
Due to stellar rotation, the observed radial velocity of a star varies during the transit of a planet across its surface, a phenomenon known as the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect. The amplitude of the RM effect is related to the radius of…
Kepler-408 is one of the 33 planet-hosting {\it Kepler} stars for which asteroseismology has been used to investigate the orientation of the stellar rotation axis relative to the planetary orbital plane. The transiting "hot Earth,"…
Knowledge of an exoplanet's oblateness and obliquity would give clues about its formation and internal structure. In principle, a light curve of a transiting planet bears information about the planet's shape, but previous work has shown…
In this paper, we show that the pattern of microlensing light curve anomalies induced by multiple planets are well described by the superposition of those of the single-planet systems where the individual planet-primary binary pairs act as…
The Kepler satellite has discovered a number of transiting planets around close binary stars. These circumbinary systems have highly aligned planetary and binary orbits. In this paper, we explore how the mutual inclination between the…
Recent observations have confirmed the existence of rings around minor bodies in the outer Solar System. These objects may possess satellites as well. Here we analytically investigate the interaction between such rings and satellites. We…
Planetary rotation rates and obliquities provide information regarding the history of planet formation, but have not yet been measured for evolved extrasolar planets. Here we investigate the theoretical and observational perspective of the…
We observed with the SOPHIE spectrograph (OHP, France) the transit of the HAT-P-6b exoplanet across its host star. The resulting stellar radial velocities display the Rossiter-McLaughlin anomaly and reveal a retrograde orbit: the planetary…
We consider the effects of mutual transits by extrasolar planet-companion systems (in a true binary or a planet-satellite system) on light curves. We show that induced changes in light curves depend strongly on a ratio between a…