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The detectability of moons of extra-solar planets is investigated, focussing on the time-of-arrival perturbation technique, a method for detecting moons of pulsar planets, and the photometric transit timing technique, a method for detecting…
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…
The transit technique is responsible for the majority of exoplanet discoveries to date. Characterizing these planets involves careful modeling of their transit profiles. A common technique involves expressing the transit duration using a…
One of the biggest challenges facing large transit surveys is the elimination of false-positives from the vast number of transit candidates. We investigate to what extent information from the lightcurves can identify blend scenarios and…
For ground-based high-resolution spectroscopic exoplanet atmosphere studies, removing the contamination from telluric and stellar lines is a crucial step in the analysis process. Despite that, there is no consensus in the literature on the…
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…
We present results from a search for additional transiting planets in 24 systems already known to contain a transiting planet. We model the transits due to the known planet in each system and subtract these models from lightcurves obtained…
We present and discuss five candidate exoplanetary systems identified with the Kepler spacecraft. These five systems show transits from multiple exoplanet candidates. Should these objects prove to be planetary in nature, then these five…
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.…
Accounting for stellar activity is a crucial component of the search for ever-smaller planets orbiting stars of all spectral types. We use Doppler imaging methods to demonstrate that starspot induced radial velocity variability can be…
We investigate whether rings around extrasolar planets could be detected from those planets' transit lightcurves. To this end we develop a basic theoretical framework for calculating and interpreting the lightcurves of ringed planet…
Variations related to stellar activity and correlated noise can prevent the detections of low-amplitude signals in radial velocity data if not accounted for. This can be seen as the greatest obstacle in detecting Earth-like planets orbiting…
The treatment of systematic noise is a significant aspect of transit exoplanet data processing due to the signal strength of systematic noise relative to a transit signal. Typically the standard approach to transit detection is to estimate…
Up to date planet ephemerides are becoming increasingly important as exoplanet science moves from detecting exoplanets to characterising their architectures and atmospheres in depth. In this work ephemerides are updated for 22 Kepler…
We search for transiting exoplanets around the star $\beta$ Pictoris using high resolution spectroscopy and Doppler imaging that removes the need for standard star observations. These data were obtained on the VLT with UVES during the…
Transit timing variations - deviations from strict periodicity between successive passages of a transiting planet - can be used to probe the structure and dynamics of multiple-planet systems. In this paper, we examine prospects for…
Compared to bright star searches, surveys for transiting planets against fainter (V=12-18) stars have the advantage of much higher sky densities of dwarf star primaries, which afford easier detection of small transiting bodies. Furthermore,…
Photometry with the transit method has arguably been the most successful exoplanet discovery method to date. A short overview about the rise of that method to its present status is given. The method's strength is the rich set of parameters…
Space-based transit search missions such as Kepler are collecting large numbers of stellar light curves of unprecedented photometric precision and time coverage. However, before this scientific goldmine can be exploited fully, the data must…
Many of the planets discovered via the radial velocity technique are hot Jupiters in 3-5 day orbits with ~10$% chance of transiting their parent star. However, radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial…