Related papers: Wide-Orbit Exoplanet Demographics
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will revolutionize our understanding of exoplanets with transit spectroscopy of a wide range of mature planets close to their host stars ($<$2 AU) and with coronagraphic imaging and spectroscopy of…
The radius of a planet is a fundamental parameter that probes its composition and habitability. Precise radius measurements are typically derived from the fraction of starlight blocked when a planet transits its host star. The wide-field…
The exoplanet detection is the most exciting and challenging field of astronomy. The discovery of many exoplanets has revolutionized our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems and has showed new ways to search for…
The Kepler, K2, and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) missions have provided a wealth of confirmed exoplanets, benefiting from a huge effort from the planet-hunting and follow-up community. With careful systematics mitigation,…
The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation…
Exoplanets, or planets outside our own solar system, have long been of interest to astronomers; however, only in the past two decades have scientists had the technology to characterize and study planets so far away from us. With advanced…
Understanding the distribution and occurrence rate of small planets was a fundamental goal of the Kepler transiting exoplanet mission, and could be improved with K2 and TESS. Deriving accurate exoplanetary radii requires accurate…
For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
We are still in the early days of exoplanet discovery. Astronomers are beginning to model the atmospheres and interiors of exoplanets and have developed a deeper understanding of processes of planet formation and evolution. However, we have…
Goal 1 of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Exoplanet Science Strategy is "to understand the formation and evolution of planetary systems as products of the process of star formation, and characterize and…
Microlensing is the only method that can detect and measure mass of wide orbit, low mass, solar system analog exoplanets. Mass measurements of such planets would yield massive science on planet formation, exoplanet demographics, free…
We examine the ability of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to detect and improve our understanding of planetary systems in the Kepler field. By modeling the expected transits of all confirmed and candidate planets detected…
The number of exoplanets detected using gravitational microlensing technique is currently larger than 200, which enables population studies. Microlensing is uniquely sensitive to low-mass planets orbiting at separations of several…
A transiting planet invites us to measure its size, mass, orbital parameters, atmospheric composition, and other characteristics. But the invitation can only be accepted if the host star is bright enough for precise measurements of its flux…
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…
In the blooming field of exoplanetary science, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets. Kepler's very precise and long-duration photometry is ideal for detecting planetary transits around Sun-like…
The discovery of exoplanets has both focused and expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The consideration of Earth as an exoplanet, the knowledge of the orbital parameters of individual exoplanets, and our new understanding…
The Kepler spacecraft provided the first long-baseline, high-precision photometry for large numbers of stars. This enabled the discovery of thousands of new exoplanets, and the characterization of myriad astrophysical phenomena. However,…