Related papers: Know the Planet, Know the Star: Precise Stellar De…
The Kepler Mission was designed to identify and characterize transiting planets in the Kepler Field of View and to determine their occurrence rates. Emphasis was placed on identification of Earth-size planets orbiting in the Habitable Zone…
Future high precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the nature of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light…
In a line caustic crossing microlensing event, the caustic line moving across the surface of the source star provides a direct method to measure the integrated luminosity profile of the star. Combined with the enormous brightening at the…
Light curve modulations in the sample of Kepler planet candidates allows the disentangling of the nature of the transiting object by photometrically measuring its mass. This is possible by detecting the effects of the gravitational pull of…
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…
One of the persistent complications in searches for transiting exoplanets is the low percentage of the detected candidates that ultimately prove to be planets, which significantly increases the load on the telescopes used for the follow-up…
The Kepler Mission is monitoring the brightness of ~150,000 stars searching for evidence of planetary transits. As part of the "Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler" (HEK) project, we report a planetary system with two confirmed planets and one…
I calculate the physical properties of 32 transiting extrasolar planet and brown dwarf systems from existing photometric observations and measured spectroscopic parameters. The systems studied include fifteen observed by CoRoT, ten by…
The transit technique is responsible for the majority of exoplanet discoveries to date. Characterizing these planets involves careful modeling of their transit profiles. A common technique involves expressing the transit duration using a…
It has long been understood that the light curve of a transiting planet constrains the density of its host star. That fact is routinely used to improve measurements of the stellar surface gravity and has been argued to be an independent…
Light echoes of flares on active stars offer the opportunity for direct detection of circumstellar dust. We revisit the problem of identifying faint echoes in post-flare light curves, focusing on debris disks from on-going planet formation.…
[Abridged] We have only been able to comprehensively characterize the atmospheres of a handful of transiting planets, because most orbit faint stars. TESS will discover transiting planets orbiting the brightest stars, enabling, in…
We perform a detailed study of six transiting planetary systems with relatively bright stars close enough to affect observations of these systems. Light curves are analysed taking into account the contaminating light and its uncertainty. We…
The coolest dwarf stars targeted by the Kepler Mission constitute a relatively small but scientifically valuable subset of the Kepler target stars, and provide a high-fidelity and nearby sample of transiting planetary systems. Using…
An exoplanet transiting in front of the disk of its parent star may hide a dark starspot causing a detectable change in the light curve, that allows to infer physical characteristics of the spot such as size and intensity. We have analysed…
Context. Kepler observations have revealed a class of short period exoplanets, of which Kepler-1520 b is the prototype, which have comet-like dust tails thought to be the result of small, rocky planets losing mass. The shape and…
We report parallaxes and proper motions from the Hawaii Infrared Parallax Program for eight nearby M dwarf stars with transiting exoplanets discovered by Kepler. We combine our directly measured distances with mass-luminosity and…
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…
For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…
We propose a method to distinguish between planetary and stellar companions to stars which present a periodic decrease in brightness, interpreted as a transit. Light curves from a total of 177 stars from the OGLE project were fitted by the…