Related papers: Disentangling planetary and stellar activity featu…
Stellar activity mitigation is one of the major challenges for the detection of earth-like exoplanets in radial velocity (RV) measurements. Several promising techniques are now investigating the use of spectral time-series, to differentiate…
Disentangling the stellar population in the central galaxy from the intrahalo light can help us shed light on the formation history of the host halo, as the properties of the stellar components are expected to retain traces of its formation…
The chromatic contamination that arises from photospheric heterogeneities e.g. spots and faculae on the host star presents a significant noise source for exoplanet transmission spectra. If this contamination is not corrected for, it can…
One of the objectives of the CoRoT mission is the search for transiting extrasolar planets using high-precision photometry, and the accurate characterization of their fundamental parameters. The CoRoT satellite consecutively observes…
Recently there has been a renewed interest in the power-2 limb darkening law for modeling exoplanet transits. This law provides a better match to the intensities generated by spherical stellar atmosphere models than other 2-parameter laws.…
Many novel methods have been proposed to mitigate stellar activity for exoplanet detection as the presence of stellar activity in radial velocity (RV) measurements is the current major limitation. Unlike traditional methods that model…
CoRoT has allowed a quantitative leap for the solar-like-star seismology thanks to 5-month-long uninterrupted timeseries of high-precision photometric data. Kepler is also starting to deliver similar data. Now, several F and G main-sequence…
Stellar limb darkening is the observed variation in brightness of a star between its centre and edge (or limb) when viewed in the plane of the sky. Stellar brightness is maximal at the centre and then decreases radially and monotonically…
Short-period planets suffer from extreme tidal forces from their parent stars causing them to deform and attain non-spherical shapes. The planet shapes, modeled here as triaxial ellipsoids, can have an impact on the observed transit light…
The use of the spectral subtraction technique allows measurements of chromospheric activity in late-type stars across several activity indicators, such as H$\alpha$ and the other Balmer lines in the visible, He I D3 and Na I D1, D2, Ca II H…
Differences in the ingress and egress shapes of transit light curves can indicate morning-evening temperature contrasts on transiting planets. Here, we pinpoint an alternative mechanism that can introduce asymmetries in transit light…
We investigate the feasibility of reconstructing the radial intensity profile of extended stellar sources by inverting their microlensed light curves. Using a simple, linear, limb darkening law as an illustration, we show that the intensity…
Stellar activity can induce signals in the radial velocities of stars, complicating the detection of orbiting low-mass planets. We present a method to determine the number of planetary signals present in radial-velocity datasets of active…
The Wide Field Camera Transit Survey is a pioneer program aimed to search for extra-solar planets in the near-infrared. The standard data reduction pipeline of the program uses aperture photometry to construct the light curves. We…
The star CoRoT102781750 reveals a puzzle, showing a very complex and altering variation in different `CoRoT colours'. We established without doubt that more than a single star was situated within the CoRoT mask. Using a search for…
Precise physical properties of the known transiting exoplanets are essential for their precise atmospheric characterization using modern and upcoming instruments. Leveraging the large volume of high SNR photometric follow-up data from TESS,…
We typically measure the radii of transiting exoplanets from the transit depth, which is given by the ratio of cross-sectional areas of the planet and star. However, if a star has dark starspots (or bright regions) distributed throughout…
Astrophysical light curves are particularly challenging data objects due to the intensity and variety of noise contaminating them. Yet, despite the astronomical volumes of light curves available, the majority of algorithms used to process…
We present a detection criterion for exo-planets to be used with the space mission COROT. This criterion is based on the transit method, which suggests the observation of star dimming caused by partial occulations by planetary companions.…
Exoplanet transits contain substantial information about the architecture of a system. By fitting transit light curves we can extract dynamical parameters and place constraints on the properties of the planets and their host star. Having a…