Related papers: Planet Occurrence: Doppler and Transit Surveys

A transiting planet eclipses part of the rotating stellar surface, thereby producing an anomalous Doppler shift of the stellar spectrum. Here I review how this "Rossiter-McLaughlin Effect" can be used to characterize exoplanetary systems.…

We present a framework to conservatively estimate the probability that any particular planet-like transit signal observed by the Kepler mission is in fact a planet, prior to any ground-based follow-up efforts. We use Monte Carlo methods…

In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…

If planetary systems are ubiquitous then a fraction of stars should possess a transiting planet when being microlensed. This paper presents a study of the influence of such planets on microlensing light curves. For the giant planets…

When extrasolar planets are observed to transit their parent stars, we are granted unprecedented access to their physical properties. It is only for transiting planets that we are permitted direct estimates of the planetary masses and…

The probability that an exoplanet transits its host star is high for planets in close orbits, but drops off rapidly for increasing semimajor axes. This makes transit surveys for planets with large semimajor axes orbiting bright stars…

Astronomers have discovered that both planets and binaries are abundant throughout the Galaxy. In combination, we know of over 100 planets in binary and higher-order multi-star systems, in both circumbinary and circumstellar configurations.…

I present an initial investigation into a new planet detection technique that uses the transit timing of a known, transiting planet. The transits of a solitary planet orbiting a star occur at equally spaced intervals in time. If a second…

Radio wavelength astrometry of stars and other objects has a long and productive history. The use of that technique to determine whether stars have planets around them would cover a nearly unique part of the parameter space for detection of…

The planet occurrence rate for multiple stars is important in two aspects. First, almost half of stellar systems in the solar neighborhood are multiple systems. Second, the comparison of the planet occurrence rate for multiple stars to that…

Moderately close binaries are a special class of targets for planet searches. From a theoretical standpoint, their hospitality to giant planets is uncertain and debated. From an observational standpoint, many of these systems present…

New transiting planet candidates are identified in sixteen months (May 2009 - September 2010) of data from the Kepler spacecraft. Nearly five thousand periodic transit-like signals are vetted against astrophysical and instrumental false…

Doppler planet searches have discovered that giant planets follow orbits with a wide range of orbital eccentricities, revolutionizing theories of planet formation. The discovery of hundreds of exoplanet candidates by NASA's Kepler mission…

The primary difficulty with using transits to discover extrasolar planets is the low probability a planet has of transiting its parent star. One way of overcoming this difficulty is to search for transits in dense stellar fields, such as…

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…

Context: Planets outside our solar system transiting their host star, i. e. those with an orbital inclination near 90 degree, are of special interest to derive physical properties of extrasolar planets. With the knowledge of the host star's…

Do white dwarfs host asteroid systems? Although several lines of argument suggest that white dwarfs may be orbited by large populations of asteroids, transits would provide the most direct evidence. We demonstrate that the Kepler mission…

Most Sun-like stars in the Galaxy reside in gravitationally-bound pairs of stars called "binary stars". While long anticipated, the existence of a "circumbinary planet" orbiting such a pair of normal stars was not definitively established…

Compared to planets around Sun-like stars, relatively little is known about the occurrence rate and orbital properties of planets around stars more massive than 1.3 Msun. The apparent deficit of planets around massive stars is due to a…

We report the distribution of planets as a function of planet radius (R_p), orbital period (P), and stellar effective temperature (Teff) for P < 50 day orbits around GK stars. These results are based on the 1,235 planets (formally "planet…