Related papers: Exoplanets: past, present, and future
In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…
Direct imaging of exoplanets presents both significant challenges and significant gains. The advantages primarily lie in receiving emitted and, with future instruments, reflected photons at phase angles not accessible by other techniques,…
The varied surfaces and atmospheres of planets make them interesting places to live, explore, and study from afar. Unfortunately, the great distance to exoplanets makes it impossible to resolve their disk with current or near-term…
Extra-solar planets have not been imaged directly with existing ground or space telescopes because they are too faint to be seen against the halo of the nearby bright star. Most techniques being explored to suppress the halo are achromatic,…
The photometric precision, monitoring baselines, and rapid, even sampling rates required by modern satellites designed for detecting the signal of transiting exoplanets are ideally suited to a large number of applications in high-energy…
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…
With the discovery of the first transiting extrasolar planetary system back to 1999, a great number of projects started to hunt for other similar systems. Because of the incidence rate of such systems was unknown and the length of the…
The detection of lower mass planets now being reported via radial velocity and microlensing surveys suggests that they may be ubiquitous. If missions such as Kepler are able to confirm this, the detection and study of rocky planets via…
The MPF mission will provide a statistical census of exoplanets with masses greater than 0.1 Earth-masses and orbital separations ranging from 0.5AU to infinity. This includes analogs to all the Solar System's planets except for Mercury, as…
Thirteen exo-planets have been discovered using the gravitational microlensing technique (out of which 7 have been published). These planets already demonstrate that super-Earths (with mass up to ~10 Earth masses) beyond the snow line are…
Exoplanets are often found with short periods or high eccentricities, and multiple-planet systems are often in resonance. They require dynamical theories that describe more extreme motions than those of the relatively placid planetary…
Microlensing has recently proven to be a valuable tool to search for extrasolar planets of Neptune- to super-Earth-mass planets at orbits of few AU. Since planetary signals are of very short duration, an intense and continuous monitoring is…
Since the discovery of a planet transiting its host star in the year 2000, thousands of additional exoplanets and exoplanet candidates have been detected, mostly by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Some of them are almost as small as the…
Astrometric measurements of stellar systems are becoming significantly more precise and common, with many ground and space-based instruments and missions approaching 1 microarcsecond precision. We examine the multi-wavelength astrometric…
In support of the Astrobiology Science Strategy, this whitepaper outlines some key technology challenges pertaining to the remote search for life in exoplanetary systems. Finding evidence for life on rocky planets outside of our solar…
In the last decade, over a million stars were monitored to detect transiting planets. Manual interpretation of potential exoplanet candidates is labor intensive and subject to human error, the results of which are difficult to quantify.…
Rings around giant exoplanets (hereafter 'exorings') are still a missing planetary phenomenon among the vast number of discovered planets. Despite the fact there exist a large number of methods for identifying and characterizing these…
The phase or orbital light curves of extrasolar terrestrial planets in reflected or emitted light will contain information about their atmospheres and surfaces complementary to data obtained by other techniques such as spectrosopy. We show…
Understanding a planet's atmosphere is a necessary condition for understanding not only the planet itself, but also its formation, structure, evolution, and habitability, This puts a premium on obtaining spectra, and developing credible…
Although there is abundant and diverse observational evidence in support of white dwarf stars hosting planets or debris disks which form in the catastrophic destruction of various planetary bodies, the key processes that explain these…