Related papers: Identifying Exo-Earth Candidates in Direct Imaging…
The search for habitable exoplanets and life beyond the Solar System is one of the most compelling scientific opportunities of our time. Nevertheless, the high cost of building facilities that can address this topic and the keen public…
Provided that sufficient resources are deployed, we can look forward to an extraordinary future in which we will characterize potentially habitable planets. Until now, we have had to base interpretations of observations on habitability…
We introduce EXOFIT, a Bayesian tool for estimating orbital parameters of extrasolar planets from radial velocity measurements. EXOFIT can search for either one or two planets at present. EXOFIT employs Markov Chain Monte Carlo method…
Exoplanet hunting efforts have revealed the prevalence of exotic worlds with diverse properties, including Earth-sized bodies, which has fueled our endeavor to search for life beyond the Solar System. Accumulating experiences in…
Direct detection, also known as direct imaging, is a method for discovering and characterizing the atmospheres of planets at intermediate and wide separations. It is the only means of obtaining spectra of non-transiting exoplanets.…
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…
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope was designed to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-like stars, but these planets are on the very edge of the mission's detection sensitivity. Accurately determining the occurrence rate…
The growing rate of increase in the number of the discovered extra-solar planets which has consequently raised the enthusiasm to explore the universe in hope of finding earth-like planets has resulted in the wide use of Gravitational…
Exoplanet research is carried out at the limits of the capabilities of current telescopes and instruments. The studied signals are weak, and often embedded in complex systematics from instrumental, telluric, and astrophysical sources.…
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…
It is suggested that the distribution of orbital eccentricities for extrasolar planets is well-described by the Beta distribution. Several properties of the Beta distribution make it a powerful tool for this purpose. For example, the Beta…
Direct imaging of exoplanets is a challenging task due to the small angular distance and high contrast relative to their host star, and the presence of quasi-static noise. We propose a new statistical method for direct imaging of exoplanets…
(Abridged) We discuss the design considerations of the EXPLORE (EXtra-solar PLanet Occultation REsearch) project, a series of transiting planet searches using 4-m-class telescopes to continuously monitor a single field of stars in the…
A space-based gravitational microlensing exoplanet survey will provide a statistical census of exoplanets with masses down to 0.1 Earth-masses and orbital separations ranging from 0.5AU to infinity. This includes analogs to all the Solar…
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…
We investigate potential biases in the measurements of exoplanet orbital parameters obtained from radial velocity observations for single-planet systems. We create a mock catalog of radial velocity data, choosing input planet masses,…
Recently, Odrzywolek and Rafelski (arXiv:1612.03556) have found three distinct categories of exoplanets, when they are classified based on density. We first carry out a similar classification of exoplanets according to their density using…
We investigate the possiblity to detect Earth-like planets, in the visible and the near infrared domains, with ground based Extremely Large Telescopes equipped with adaptive systems capable of providing high Strehl ratios. From a detailed…
Microlensing is the method of exoplanet detection that discovers solar system analog exoplanets. These are planets low in mass located in wide orbits around their host stars. Even though thousands of exoplanets are discovered, they are…
The best-characterized exoplanets to date are planets on close-in transiting orbits around their host stars. The high level of irradiation and transiting geometry of these objects make them ideal targets for atmospheric investigations.…