Related papers: Design Considerations for a Ground-Based Search fo…
Searching for transits provides a very promising technique for finding close-in extra-solar planets. Transiting planets present the advantage of allowing one to determine physical properties such as mass and radius unambiguously. The…
Context. Radial velocity monitoring of very cool dwarfs such as late M- and hot L-dwarfs has become a promising tool to search for rocky planets as well as to follow-up planetary candidates around dwarfs found by transit surveys. These…
Many ground-based photometric surveys are now under way, and five of them have been successful at detecting transiting exoplanets. Nevertheless, detecting transiting planets has turned out to be much more challenging than initially…
The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project uses data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer to detect infrared objects with significant motion. In this work, we present the majority of the L and T dwarf candidates…
We describe a new transit detection algorithm designed to detect single transit events in discontinuous Perkins INfrared Exosatellite Survey (PINES) observations of L and T dwarfs. We use this algorithm to search for transits in 131 PINES…
Astrophysical false positives due to stellar eclipsing binaries pose one of the greatest challenges to ground-based surveys for transiting Hot Jupiters. We have used known properties of multiple star systems and Hot Jupiter systems to…
We conducted a search for brown dwarf candidates in a James Webb Space Telescope deep field around A2744 to investigate the space density of these objects at kiloparsec distances. Our methodology employed an initial selection based on…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is a NASA-sponsored Explorer mission that will perform a wide-field survey for planets that transit bright host stars. Here, we predict the properties of the transiting planets that TESS will…
The Pan-Planets survey observed an area of 42 sq deg. in the galactic disk for about 165 hours. The main scientific goal of the project is the detection of transiting planets around M dwarfs. We establish an efficient procedure for…
We present the results of simulations on the detectability of $O_2$ in the atmosphere of Earth twins around nearby low mass stars using high resolution transmission spectroscopy. We explore such detectability with each of the three upcoming…
We present an improved estimate of the occurrence rate of small planets orbiting small stars by searching the full four-year Kepler data set for transiting planets using our own planet detection pipeline and conducting transit injection and…
We show that a space-based gravitational microlensing survey for terrestrial extra-solar planets is feasible in the near future, and could provide a nearly complete picture of the properties of planetary systems in our Galaxy. We present…
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 Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has been designed in order to satisfy several different scientific objectives that can be addressed by a ten-year synoptic sky survey. However, LSST will also provide a large amount of data that…
The proposed Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will survey the entire sky to locate the nearest and brightest transiting extrasolar planets with orbital periods up to about 36 days. Here we estimate the number and kind of…
With the first observations of debris disks as well as proposed planets around white dwarfs, the question of how rocky planets around such stellar remnants can be characterized and probed for signs of life becomes tangible. White dwarfs are…
In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…
Ultra-cool dwarfs are very low-mass stars or brown dwarfs and because of their faintness they are difficult targets for radial velocity and transit planet searches. High-precision astrometry is one way to efficiently discover planets around…
Planet formation theories predict a large but still undetected population of short-period terrestrial planets orbiting brown dwarfs. Should specimens of this population be discovered transiting relatively bright and nearby brown dwarfs, the…
We describe a project (transitsearch.org) currently attempting to discover transiting intermediate-period planets orbiting bright parent stars, and we simulate that project's performance. The discovery of such a transit would be an…