Related papers: SPECULOOS exoplanet search and its prototype on TR…
The search for habitable exoplanets and life beyond the Solar System is one of the most compelling scientific opportunities of our time. Nevertheless, the high cost of building facilities that can address this topic and the keen public…
Nine transiting Earth-sized planets have recently been discovered around nearby late M dwarfs, including the TRAPPIST-1 planets and two planets discovered by the MEarth survey, GJ 1132b and LHS 1140b. These planets are the smallest known…
Searching for transits provides a very promising technique for finding close-in extra-solar planets. Transiting planets present the advantage of allowing one to determine physical properties such as mass and radius unambiguously. The…
The signatures of planets hosted by M dwarfs are more readily detected with transit photometry and radial velocity methods than those of planets around larger stars. Recently, transit photometry was used to discover seven planets orbiting…
The search for extrasolar rocky planets has already found the first transiting rocky super-Earth, Corot 7b, with a surface temperature that allows for magma oceans. Here we ask if we could distinguish rocky planets with recent major…
Transmission spectroscopy of Earth-like exoplanets is a potential tool for habitability screening. Transiting planets are present-day "Rosetta Stones" for understanding extrasolar planets because they offer the possibility to characterize…
We report the detection of UCF-1.01, a strong exoplanet candidate with a radius 0.66 +/- 0.04 times that of Earth (R_{\oplus}). This sub-Earth-sized planet transits the nearby M-dwarf star GJ 436 with a period of 1.365862 +/- 8x10^{-6}…
Within the next few years, several instruments aiming at imaging extrasolar planets will see first light. In parallel, low mass planets are being searched around red dwarfs which offer more favorable conditions, both for radial velocity…
The very recent discovery of planets orbiting very low mass stars sheds light on these exotic objects. Planetary systems around low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are very different from our solar system: the planets are expected to be much…
Surveys for nearby low-luminosity dwarfs tend to avoid the crowded regions of the Galactic Plane. We have devised near-infrared colour-magnitude and colour-colour selection criteria designed to identify late-type M and early-type L dwarfs…
The era of exoplanet characterization is upon us. For a subset of exoplanets -- the transiting planets -- physical properties can be measured, including mass, radius, and atmosphere characteristics. Indeed, measuring the atmospheres of a…
The last few years has seen a dramatic increase in the number of exoplanets known and in the range of methods for characterising their atmospheric properties. At the same time, new discoveries of increasingly cooler brown dwarfs have pushed…
The nominal habitable zone for exoplanets orbiting M dwarfs lies close to the host star, making dynamical considerations especially important. One consequence of this proximity is the expectation of spin synchronization, with implications…
Nowadays, we know thousands of exoplanets, some of them potentially habitable. Next technological facilities (JWST, for example) have exoplanet atmosphere analysis capabilities, but they also have limits in terms of how many targets can be…
High contrast direct imaging of exoplanets can provide many important observables, including measurements of the orbit, spectra that probe the lower layers of the atmosphere, and phase variations of the planet, but cannot directly measure…
[Abridged] It is expected that the ongoing and future space-borne planet survey missions including TESS, PLATO, and Earth 2.0 will detect thousands of small to medium-sized planets via the transit technique, including over a hundred…
Previous generation of instruments have the opportunity to discover thousands of extra-solar planets and more will come with the current and future planet-search missions. In order to go one step further in the characterization of…
The closest potentially habitable worlds outside our Solar system orbit a different kind of star than our Sun: smaller red dwarf stars. Such stars can flare frequently, bombarding their planets with biologically damaging high-energy UV…
Ultraviolet observations of Ultra-hot Jupiters (UHJs), exoplanets with temperatures over 2000\,K, provide us with an opportunity to investigate if and how atmospheric escape shapes their upper atmosphere. Near-ultraviolet transit…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will provide an opportunity to investigate the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets. Aerosols, significantly mute molecular features in transit spectra because they prevent light from probing…