Related papers: Design Considerations for a Ground-Based Search fo…
In our search for life beyond the Solar System, certain planetary bodies may be more conducive to life than Earth. However, the observability of these `superhabitable' planets in the habitable zones around K dwarf stars has not been fully…
Direct imaging is likely the best way to characterize the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars. Previously, Stark et al. (2014, 2015, 2016) estimated the Earth twin yield of future direct imaging…
The ExTrA facility, located at La Silla observatory, will consist of a near-infrared multi-object spectrograph fed by three 60-cm telescopes. ExTrA will add the spectroscopic resolution to the traditional differential photometry method.…
Radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial amounts of large telescope time in order to monitor a sufficient number of stars. Two of the aspects which can limit such surveys are the single-object…
[ABRIDGED] In this study, we set out to a) demonstrate the sensitivity to <4 R_E transiting planets with periods of a few days around our program stars, and b) improve our knowledge of some astrophysical properties(e.g., activity, rotation)…
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) has the potential to measure parallaxes for thousands of nearby ultracool dwarfs, enabling improved measurements of the brown dwarf luminosity function. We develop a…
The MEarth survey is a search for small rocky planets around the smallest, nearest stars to the Sun as identified by high proper motion with red colors. We augmented our planetary search time series with lower cadence astrometric imaging…
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…
We report the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) discovery of three terrestrial-sized planets transiting L 98-59 (TOI-175, TIC 307210830) -- a bright M dwarf at a distance of 10.6 pc. Using the Gaia-measured distance and…
I report the results of a new search for transiting planets on a set of 1.4 million lightcurves extracted from TESS Full Frame Images (FFIs) using the DIAmante pipeline. The data come from the first two years of observations of TESS…
Ground-based searches for transiting Jupiter-sized planets have so far produced few detections of planets, but many of stellar systems with eclipse depths, durations, and orbital periods that resemble those expected from planets. I show…
Ground-based photometric surveys have led to the discovery of six transiting exoplanets, five of which were detected by the OGLE survey. The FLAMES multi-object spectrograph on the VLT has permitted a very efficient follow-up of the OGLE…
This paper presents results of a near-infrared imaging survey for low mass stellar and substellar companions to white dwarfs. A wide field proper motion survey of 261 white dwarfs was capable of directly detecting companions at orbital…
The Monitor project is a photometric monitoring survey of nine young (1-200Myr) clusters in the solar neighbourhood to search for eclipses by very low mass stars and brown dwarfs and for planetary transits in the light curves of cluster…
I derive analytic scalings for coronagraphic imaging searches for extrasolar planets. I compute the efficiency of detecting planets about any given star, and from this compute dimensionless distribution functions for the detected planets as…
With the development of high contrast imaging techniques and infrared detectors, vast efforts have been devoted during the past decade to detect and characterize lighter, cooler and closer companions to nearby stars, and ultimately image…
Near-IR observations are important for the detection and characterization of exoplanets using the transit technique, either in surveys of large numbers of stars or for follow-up spectroscopic observations of individual planets. In a…
The ongoing optical time-domain astronomy surveys are routinely reporting fifty transient candidates per night. Here, I investigate the demographics of astronomical transients and supernova classifications reported to the Transient Name…
White dwarf spectroscopy shows that nearly half of white dwarf atmospheres contain metals that must have been accreted from planetary material that survived the red giant phases of stellar evolution. We can use metal pollution in white…
We report the results of an infrared Doppler survey designed to detect brown dwarf and giant planetary companions to a magnitude-limited sample of ultracool dwarfs. Using the NIRSPEC spectrograph on the Keck II telescope, we obtained…