Related papers: On the Detection of Extrasolar Moons and Rings
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…
All 4 giant planets in the Solar System host systems of multiple moons, whereas the terrestrial planets only host up to 2 moons. The Earth can capture small asteroids as temporary satellites, which begs the question as to how many moons…
The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
The Kepler Mission was launched on March 6, 2009 to perform a photometric survey of more than 100,000 dwarf stars to search for terrestrial-size planets with the transit technique. Follow-up observations of planetary candidates identified…
M dwarfs host most of the exoplanets in the local Milky Way. Some of these planets, ranging from sub-Earths to super-Jupiters, orbit in their stars' habitable zones (HZs), although many likely possess surface environments that preclude…
The search for planets orbiting other stars has recently expanded to include stars from galaxies outside the Milky Way. With the TESS and Gaia surveys, photometric and kinematic information can be combined to identify transiting planet…
Of the approximately 350 extrasolar planets currently known, of order 10% orbit evolved stars with radii R >~ 2.5 R_sun. These planets are of particular interest because they tend to orbit more massive hosts, and have been subjected to…
The discovery of extra-solar planets is one of the greatest achievements of modern astronomy. The detection of planets with a wide range of masses demonstrates that extra-solar planets of low mass exist. In this paper we describe a mission,…
Most exoplanets have been discovered via radial velocity studies, which are inherently insensitive to orbital inclination. Interferometric observations will show evidence of a stellar companion if it sufficiently bright, regardless of the…
This paper compares the statistical features of the sample of discovered extrasolar planets with those of the secondaries in nearby spectroscopic binaries, in order to enable us to distinguish between the two populations. Based on 32 planet…
When we are fortunate enough to view an exoplanetary system nearly edge-on, the star and planet periodically eclipse each other. Observations of eclipses (transits and occultations) provide a bonanza of information that cannot be obtained…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
One of the primary surprises of exoplanet detections has been the discovery of compact planetary systems, whereby numerous planets reside within ~0.5 AU of the host star. Many of these kinds of systems have been discovered in recent years,…
The Kepler survey provides a statistical census of planetary systems out to the habitable zone. Because most planets are non-transiting, orbital architectures are best estimated using simulated observations of ensemble populations. Here, we…
The Kepler mission has discovered a large number of planetary systems. We analyze the implications of the discovered single/multi-exoplanet systems from Kepler's data. As done in previous works, we test a simple model in which the intrinsic…
Astrophysical research into exoplanets has delivered thousands of confirmed planets orbiting distant stars. These planets span a wide ranges of size and composition, with diversity also being the hallmark of system configurations, the great…
Thousands of transiting exoplanets have been discovered to date, thanks in great part to the {\em Kepler} space mission. As in all populations, and certainly in the case of exoplanets, one finds unique objects with distinct characteristics.…
There are more than 200 moons in our Solar System, but their relatively small radii make similarly sized extrasolar moons very hard to detect with current instruments. The best exomoon candidates so far are two nearly Neptune-sized bodies…
New discoveries of transiting extrasolar planets are reported weekly. Ground based surveys as well as space borne observatories like CoRoT and Kepler are responsible for filling the statistical voids of planets on distant stellar systems. I…
We introduce a new method of searching for and characterizing extra-solar planets. We show that by monitoring the center-of-light motion of microlensing alerts using the next generation of high precision astrometric instruments the…