Related papers: Exoplanets: past, present, and future
The discovery of transiting extrasolar planets has enabled us a number of interesting stduies. Transit photometry reveals the radius and the orbital inclination of transiting planets, and thereby we can learn the true mass and the density…
Close-in extrasolar giant planets may be directly detectable by their reflected light, due to the proximity of the planet to the illuminating star. The spectrum of the system will contain a reflected light component that varies in amplitude…
The discovery of rings around extrasolar planets ("exorings") is one of the next breakthroughs in exoplanetary research. Previous studies have explored the feasibility of detecting exorings with present and future photometric sensitivities…
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…
Directly imaging extrasolar planets using a monolithic optical telescope avoids many pitfalls of space interferometry and opens up the prospect of visible light studies of extrasolar planetary systems. Future astronomical missions may…
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…
Over the past three decades instruments on the ground and in space have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. These observations have given rise to an astonishingly detailed picture of the demographics of short-period…
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,…
Exoplanet research has shown an incessant growth since the first claim of a hot giant planet around a solar-like star in the mid-1990s. Today, the new facilities are working to spot the first habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars as…
The direct images of giant extrasolar planets recently obtained around several main sequence stars represent a major step in the study of planetary systems. These high-dynamic range images are among the most striking results obtained by the…
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…
Over 300 extrasolar planets (exoplanets) have been detected orbiting nearby stars. We now hope to conduct a census of all planets around nearby stars and to characterize their atmospheres and surfaces with spectroscopy. Rocky planets within…
Exoplanets in protoplanetary disks cause localized deviations from Keplerian velocity in channel maps of molecular line emission. Current methods of characterizing these deviations are time consuming, and there is no unified standard…
The discovery of extra-solar planets is arguably the most exciting development in astrophysics during the past 15 years, rivalled only by the detection of dark energy. Two projects unite the communities of exoplanet scientists and…
Nearly 30 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet around a main sequence star, thousands of planets have now been confirmed. These discoveries have completely revolutionized our understanding of planetary systems, revealing types…
Started approximately in the late 1980s, exoplanetology has up to now unveiled the main gross bulk characteristics of planets and planetary systems. In the future it will benefit from more and more large telescopes and advanced space…
The discovery of habitable exoplanets has long been a heated topic in astronomy. Traditional methods for exoplanet identification include the wobble method, direct imaging, gravitational microlensing, etc., which not only require a…
Microlensing offers a unique opportunity to probe exoplanets that are temperate and beyond the snow line, as small as Jovian satellites, at extragalactic distance, and even free floating exoplanets, regimes where the sensitivity of other…
Stellar surface processes represent a fundamental limit to the detection of extrasolar planets with the currently most heavily-used techniques. As such, considerable effort has gone into trying to mitigate the impact of these processes on…
Numerous telescopes and techniques have been used to find and study extrasolar planets, but none has been more successful than NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler has discovered the majority of known exoplanets, the smallest planets to…