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This thesis focuses on the detection of extrasolar planets via the transit method, and more specifically addresses issues relevant to the preparation of upcoming space missions such as CoRoT, Kepler, Eddington, aiming to detect terrestrial…

To date, a handful of exoplanets have been photometrically mapped using phase-modulated reflection or emission from their surfaces, but the small amplitudes of such signals have limited previous maps almost exclusively to coarse dipolar…

Many of the directly imaged self-luminous gas giant exoplanets have been found to have cloudy atmospheres. Scattering of the emergent thermal radiation from these planets by the dust grains in their atmospheres should locally give rise to…

The prevalence of atmospheres on rocky planets is one of the major questions in exoplanet astronomy, but there are currently no published unambiguous detections of atmospheres on any rocky exoplanets. The MIRI instrument on JWST can measure…

The search for life outside of the Solar System should not be restricted to exclusively planetary bodies; large moons of extrasolar planets may also be common habitable environments throughout the Galaxy. Extrasolar moons, or exomoons, may…

The radius of a planet is a fundamental parameter that probes its composition and habitability. Precise radius measurements are typically derived from the fraction of starlight blocked when a planet transits its host star. The wide-field…

Future surveys for transiting extrasolar planets, including the space-based mission Kepler (Borucki et al 2003), are expected to detect hundreds of Jovian mass planets and tens of terrestrial mass planets. For many of these newly discovered…

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…

In the effort to characterize the masses, radii, and atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets, there is an urgent need to find examples of such planets transiting nearby M dwarfs. The MEarth Project is an ongoing effort to do so, as…

The presence of silicate material in known rings in the Solar System raises the possibility of ring systems existing even within the snow line -- where most transiting exoplanets are found. Previous studies have shown that the detection of…

In the near-future, dedicated telescopes observe Earth-like exoplanets in reflected light, allowing their characterization. Because of the huge distances, every exoplanet will be a single pixel, but temporal variations in its spectral flux…

The XO project aims at detecting transiting exoplanets around bright stars from the ground using small telescopes. The original configuration of XO (McCullough et al. 2005) has been changed and extended as described here. The instrumental…

Observational surveys for extrasolar planets probe the diverse outcomes of planet formation and evolution. These surveys measure the frequency of planets with different masses, sizes, orbital characteristics, and host star properties. Small…

When an exoplanet passes behind its host star, we can measure the time of the occultation, its depth, and its color. In this chapter we describe how these observables can be used to deduce physical characteristics of the planet such as its…

Many of the planets discovered via the radial velocity technique are hot Jupiters in 3-5 day orbits with ~10$% chance of transiting their parent star. However, radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial…

One of the promising methods to search for life on extra-solar planets (exoplanets) is to detect life's signatures in their atmospheres. Spectra of exoplanet atmospheres at the modest resolution needed to search for oxygen, carbon dioxide,…

The initial task that confronted extrasolar-planet transit surveys was to monitor enough stars with sufficient photometric precision and complete phase coverage. Numerous searches have been pursued over the last few years. Among these…

Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while…

Never before has the detection and characterization of exoplanets via transit photometry been as promising and feasible as it is now, due to the increasing breadth and sensitivity of time domain optical surveys. Past works have made use of…

We present a theoretical analysis of the optical light curves (LCs) for short-period high-mass transiting extrasolar planet systems. Our method considers the primary transit, the secondary eclipse, and the overall phase shape of the LC…