Related papers: Direct detection and characterization of M-dwarf p…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
Exoplanets, short for `extra solar planets', are planets outside our solar system. They are objects with masses less than around 15 Jupiter-masses that orbit stars other than the Sun. They are small enough so they can not burn deuterium in…
Being able to accurately estimate stellar parameters based on spectral observations is important not only for understanding the stars themselves but it is also vital for the determination of exoplanet parameters. M dwarfs are discussed as…
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…
Imaging of planets is very difficult, due to the glare from their nearby, much brighter suns. Static and slowly-evolving aberrations are the limiting factors, even after application of adaptive optics. The residual speckle pattern is highly…
Most of the stars in the Universe are M spectral class dwarfs, which are known to be the source of bright and frequent stellar flares. In this paper, we propose new approaches to discover M-dwarf flares in ground-based photometric surveys.…
Stellar flares present challenges to the potential habitability of terrestrial planets orbiting M dwarf stars through inducing changes in the atmospheric composition and irradiating the planet's surface in large amounts of ultraviolet…
We demonstrate that gravitational lensing can be used to discover and study planets in the habitable zones of nearby dwarf stars. If appropriate software is developed, a new generation of monitoring programs will automatically conduct a…
Ultraviolet flare emission can drive photochemistry in exoplanet atmospheres and even serve as the primary source of uncertainty in atmospheric retrievals. Additionally, flare energy budgets are not well-understood due to a paucity of…
Among various techniques to search for extra-solar planets, microlensing has some unique characteristics. Contrary to all other methods which favour nearby objects, microlensing is sensitive to planets around stars at distances of several…
EChO is a dedicated mission to investigate exoplanetary atmospheres. When extracting the planetary signal, one has to take care of the variability of the hosting star, which introduces spectral distortion that can be mistaken as planetary…
An extrasolar planet can be detected via microlensing from the perturbation it makes in the smooth lensing light curve of the primary. In addition to the conventional photometric microlensing, astrometric observation of the center-of-light…
Solar flares are often accompanied by filament/prominence eruptions, sometimes leading to coronal mass ejections (CMEs). By analogy, we expect that stellar flares are also associated with stellar CMEs whose properties are essential to know…
On planets near M dwarfs, photosynthesis (PS) will occur with an effectiveness which depends on the supply of visible photons with wavelengths between 400 and 700 nm. In this paper, we quantify the effectiveness of PS in two contexts which…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
Terrestrial planets are more likely to be detected if they orbit M dwarfs due to the favorable planet/star size and mass ratios. However, M dwarf habitable zones are significantly closer to the star than the one around our Sun, which leads…
Research into light curves from stars (temporal variation of brightness) has completely changed how exoplanets are discovered or characterised. This study including star light curves from the Kepler dataset as a way to discover exoplanets…
Magnetic fields play a crucial role in planetary evolution and habitability. While the intrinsic magnetic fields of solar system planets are relatively well understood, the magnetic properties of exoplanets remain largely unconstrained,…
At optical wavelengths, an exoplanet's signature is essentially reflected light from the host star - several orders of magnitude fainter. Since it is superimposed on the star spectrum its detection has been a difficult observational…
We present the results of a campaign to monitor active M dwarfs using infrared spectroscopy, supplemented with optical photometry and spectroscopy. We detected 16 flares during nearly 50 hours of observations on EV Lac, AD Leo, YZ CMi, and…