Related papers: Disentangling planetary and stellar activity featu…
Lightcurves have long been used to study stellar activity and have more recently become a major tool in the field of exoplanet research. We discuss the various ways in which stellar activity can influence transit lightcurves, and study the…
Intrinsic stellar variability can hinder the detection of shallow transits, particularly in space-based data. Therefore, this variability has to be filtered out before running the transit search. Unfortunately, filtering out the low…
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…
In the context of the space-based mission CoRoT, devoted to asteroseismology and search for planet transits, we analyse the accuracy of fundamental stellar parameters (mass, radius, luminosity) that can be obtained from asteroseismological…
We analyze the surface structure of the planet host star CoRoT-2a using a consistent model for both the `global' (i.e., rotationally modulated) lightcurve and the transit lightcurves, using data provided by the CoRoT mission. Selecting a…
As a planet eclipses its parent star, a dark spot on the surface of the star may be occulted, causing a detectable variation in the light curve. A total of 77 consecutive transit light curves of CoRoT-2 were observed with a high temporal…
I briefly review the current state of the modelling of photospheric activity based on the high-precision optical light curves obtained with MOST, CoRoT, and Kepler. These models can be used to search for active longitudes where activity is…
Photospheric stellar activity might be an important source of noise and confusion in the radial-velocity measurements. RV planet search surveys as well as follow-up of photometric transit surveys require a deeper understanding and…
The photospheric spot activity of some of the stars with transiting planets discovered by the CoRoT space experiment is reviewed. Their out-of-transit light modulations are fitted by a spot model previously tested with the total solar…
In this short paper, we study the photometric precision of stellar light curves obtained by the CoRoT satellite in its planet finding channel, with a particular emphasis on the timescales characteristic of planetary transits. Together with…
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…
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…
Light curves produced by wide-field exoplanet transit surveys such as CoRoT, Kepler, and TESS are affected by sensor-wide systematic noise which is correlated both spatiotemporally and with other instrumental parameters such as photometric…
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…
The properties of a transiting planet's host star are written in its transit light curve. The light curve can reveal the stellar density and the limb darkening profile in addition to the characteristics of the planet and its orbit. For…
Our aim in this paper is to refine the orbital and physical parameters of the HATS-2 planetary system and study transit timing variations and atmospheric composition thanks to transit observations that span more than ten years and that were…
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 derive solutions to transit light curves of exoplanets orbiting rapidly-rotating stars. These stars exhibit significant oblateness and gravity darkening, a phenomenon where the poles of the star have a higher temperature and luminosity…
The detrending algorithms which are widely used to reduce the impact of stellar variability on space-based transit surveys are ill-suited for estimating the parameters of confirmed planets, as they unavoidably alter the transit signal. We…
Limb darkening laws are convenient parameterizations of the stellar intensity center-to-limb variation, and their use is ubiquitous in eclipse and transit modeling. But they are not "laws" in any sense -- they are simple approximations of…