Related papers: In-flight photometry extraction of PLATO targets: …
Photometric phase curves provide an important window onto exoplanetary atmospheres and potentially even their surfaces. With similar amplitudes to occultations but far longer baselines, they have a higher sensitivity to planetary photons at…
The PLATO mission is scheduled for launch early 2027. In this paper we present an overview of the performance drivers for the mission at the time where all flight models of the cameras have been tested and integrated on the optical bench.…
One proposed method for finding terrestrial planets around nearby stars is to use two spacecraft--a telescope and a specially shaped occulter that is specifically designed to prevent all but a tiny fraction of the starlight from diffracting…
We present A-PHOT, a new publicly available code for performing aperture photometry on astronomical images, that is particularly well suited for multi-band extragalactic surveys. A-PHOT estimates the fluxes emitted by astronomical objects…
Spectrophotometric stability, which is crucial in the spectral characterization of transiting exoplanets, is affected by photometric variations arising from field-stop loss in space telescopes with pointing jitter or primary mirror…
One of the obstacles in the search for exoplanets via transits is the large number of candidates that must be followed up, few of which ultimately prove to be exoplanets. Any method that could make this process more efficient by somehow…
Open clusters potentially provide an ideal environment for the search for transiting extrasolar planets since they feature a relatively large number of stars of the same known age and metallicity at the same distance. With this motivation,…
The photometric transit method has been the most effective method to detect and characterize exoplanets as several ground-based as well as space-based survey missions have discovered thousands of exoplanets using this method. With the…
We develop an inversion technique of annual scattered light curves to sketch a two-dimensional albedo map of exoplanets in face-on orbits. As a test-bed for future observations of extrasolar terrestrial planets, we apply this mapping…
Since 2008 we have run an observational program to accurately measure the characteristics of known exoplanet systems hosting close-in transiting giant planets, i.e. hot Jupiters. Our study is based on high-quality photometric follow-up…
A promising method to detect earth-sized exoplanets is the timing analysis of a known transit. The technique allows a search for variations in transit duration or center induced by the perturbation of a third body, e.g. a second planet or…
Context. The TESS and PLATO missions are expected to find vast numbers of new transiting planet candidates. However, only a fraction of these candidates will be legitimate planets, and the candidate validation will require a significant…
The direct detection of exoplanets has been the subject of intensive research in the recent years. Data obtained with future high-contrast imaging instruments optimized for giant planets direct detection are strongly limited by the speckle…
The Planet Hunting and Asteroseismology Explorer Spectrophotometer, PHASES, is a concept for a space-borne instrument to obtain flux calibrated spectra and measure micro-magnitude photometric variations of nearby stars. The science drivers…
The space missions TESS and PLATO plan to double the number of 4000 exoplanets already discovered and will measure the size of thousands of exoplanets around the brightest stars in the sky, allowing ground-based radial velocity spectroscopy…
Context. Transit detection algorithms are mathematical tools used for detecting planets in the photometric data of transit surveys. In this work we study their application to space-based surveys. Aims: Space missions are exploring the…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission measured light from stars in ~75% of the sky throughout its two year primary mission, resulting in millions of TESS 30-minute cadence light curves to analyze in the search for…
The space mission CoRoT (COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits) will offer the possibility to detect extrasolar planets by means of the transit method. The satellite will observe about 60000 targets in the range 11.0<V<16.0, located…
(Abridged) Space missions to search for exo-planets via the transit method, such as COROT, Eddington and Kepler, will need to address problems associated with the automated and efficient detection of planetary transits in light curves…
I present a brief summary of three different types of binary star - astrometric, spectroscopic and eclipsing - and tabulate the properties of these systems that can be determined directly from observations. Eclipsing binary stars are the…