Related papers: A Framework for Planet Detection with Faint Light-…
The detection of planetary transits in stellar photometric light-curves is poised to become the main method for finding substantial numbers of terrestrial planets. The French-European mission COROT (foreseen for launch in 2005) will perform…
To detect brown dwarfs in the dark galactic halo through gravitational lensing, experiments follow the luminosity of millions of stars to observe a few lensing events par year. The luminosity of a star too faint to be continuously followed…
One of the great quests of astronomy is to obtain the spectrum of a terrestrial planet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star, and the dominant challenge in doing so is to isolate the light of the planet from that of the star.…
The occurrence of a planet transiting in front of its host star offers the opportunity to observe the planet's atmosphere filtering starlight. The fraction of occulted stellar flux is roughly proportional to the optically thick area of the…
Context. Detecting regular dips in the light curve of a star is an easy way to detect the presence of an orbiting planet. COROT is a Franco-European mission launched at the end of 2006, and one of its main objectives is to detect planetary…
Most extrasolar planets currently known were discovered by means of an indirect method that measures the stellar wobble caused by the planet. We previously studied a triple system composed of a star and a nearby binary on circular coplanar…
Diluted arrays of many optical apertures will be able to provide h igh-resolution snapshot images if the beams are combined according to the densified-pupil scheme. We show that the same principle can also provide coronagraphic images, for…
All water-covered rocky planets in the inner habitable zones of solar-type stars will inevitably experience a catastrophic runaway climate due to increasing stellar luminosity and limits to outgoing infrared radiation from wet greenhouse…
Previously, planets have been detected only in the Milky Way galaxy. Here, we show that quasar microlensing provides a means to probe extragalactic planets in the lens galaxy, by studying the microlensing properties of emission close to the…
Microlensing has proven to be a valuable tool to search for extrasolar planets of Jovian- to Super-Earth-mass planets at orbits of a few AU. Since planetary signals are of very short duration, an intense and continuous monitoring is…
We use Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the number of extrasolar planets that are directly detectable in the solar-neighborhood using current and forthcoming high-contrast imaging instruments. Our calculations take into account the…
We investigate the possiblity to detect Earth-like planets, in the visible and the near infrared domains, with ground based Extremely Large Telescopes equipped with adaptive systems capable of providing high Strehl ratios. From a detailed…
Transiting extrasolar planets constitute only a small fraction of the range of stellar systems found to display periodic, shallow dimmings in wide-field surveys employing small-aperture camera arrays. Here we present an efficient selection…
White-light flares (WLFs) are crucial for understanding the energy transport and heating processes in the lower solar atmosphere. Systematic studies are highly necessary. However, most WLFs are very weak and difficult to detect. To address…
Detecting and confirming terrestrial planets is incredibly difficult due to their tiny size and mass relative to Sun-like host stars. However, recent instrumental advancements are making the detection of Earth-like exoplanets…
We present the results of a search for stellar flares from stars neighbouring the target sources in the Kepler short cadence data. These flares have been discarded as contaminants in previous surveys and therefore provide an unexplored…
The detection and characterization of Earth-like planet is approaching rapidly thanks to radial velocity surveys (HARPS), transit searches (Corot, Kepler) and space observatories dedicated to their characterization are already in…
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…
We have developed a maximum likelihood source detection method capable of detecting ultra-faint streaks with surface brightnesses approximately an order of magnitude fainter than the pixel level noise. Our maximum likelihood detection…
A key to understand exoplanets is characterisation of their host stars. One of the most powerful tools to characterise stellar properties like effective temperature, surface gravity and metallicity, is spectroscopy based on observations of…