Related papers: Disentangling Blended K2 Photometry: Determining t…
The formation and dynamical history of hot Jupiters is currently debated, with wide stellar binaries having been suggested as a potential formation pathway. Additionally, contaminating light from both binary companions and unassociated…
A crucial aspect of understanding planet formation is determining the binarity of the host stars. Results from radial velocity surveys and the follow-up of Kepler exoplanet candidates have demonstrated that stellar binarity certainly does…
All transiting planets are at risk of contamination by blends with nearby, unresolved stars. Blends dilute the transit signal, causing the planet to appear smaller than it really is, or produce a false positive detection when the target…
The Kepler mission and subsequent ground-based follow-up observations have revealed a number of exoplanet host stars with nearby stellar companions. This study presents speckle observations of 57 Kepler objects of interest (KOIs) that are…
We present high-resolution observations of a sample of 75 K2 targets from Campaigns 1-3 using speckle interferometry on the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope and adaptive optics (AO) imaging at the Keck II telescope. The…
The vast majority of extrasolar planets are detected by indirect detection methods such as transit monitoring and radial velocity measurements. While these methods are very successful in detecting short-periodic planets, they are mostly…
Young, intermediate-mass stars are experiencing renewed interest as targets for direct-imaging planet searches. However, these types of stars are part of multiple systems more often than not. Close stellar companions affect the formation…
The Kepler mission has discovered thousands of planet candidates. Currently, some of them have already been discarded; more than 200 have been confirmed by follow-up observations, and several hundreds have been validated. However, most of…
The properties of a transiting planet's host star are written in its transit light curve. The light curve can reveal the stellar density and the limb darkening profile in addition to the characteristics of the planet and its orbit. For…
Close binary stars are binary stars where the component stars are close enough such that they can exchange mass and/or energy. They are subdivided into semi-detached, overcontact or ellipsoidal binary stars. A challenging problem in the…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
(Abbreviated) Kepler planet candidates require both spectroscopic and imaging follow-up observations to rule out false positives and detect blended stars. [...] In this paper, we examine a sample of 11 Kepler host stars with companions…
We present a new method for differentiating between planetary transits and eclipsing binaries based on the presence of the ellipsoidal light variations. These variations can be used to detect stellar secondaries with masses ~0.2 M_sun…
With more and more extrasolar planets discovered in and around binary star systems, questions concerning the determination of the classical Habitable Zone arise. Do the radiative and gravitational perturbations of the second star influence…
High-resolution ground-based optical speckle and near-infrared adaptive optics images are taken to search for stars in close angular proximity to host stars of candidate planets identified by the NASA Kepler Mission. Neighboring stars are a…
We analyze the properties of searches devoted to finding planetary transits by observing simple stellar systems, such as globular clusters, open clusters, and the Galactic bulge. We develop the analytic tools necessary to predict the number…
Of the over 450 exoplanets known to date, more than 420 of them have been discovered using radial velocity studies, a method that tells nothing about the inclination of the planet's orbit. Because it is more likely that the companion is a…
Estimating the effect binarity can have on planet-formation is of crucial importance, as almost half of field stars reside in multiple systems. One effective way to assess this effect is to get an accurate picture of the population of…
We investigate the rate of false planetary transit detection due to blending with eclipsing binaries. Our approach is purely empirical and is based on the analysis of the artificially blended light curves of the eclipsing binary stars in…
The dynamical influence of binary companions is expected to profoundly influence planetary systems. However, the difficulty of identifying planets in binary systems has left the magnitude of this effect uncertain; despite numerous…