Related papers: Ondr}ejov echelle spectrograph, ground based suppo…
Much of the exoplanet discovery efforts over the next several years are largely tasked with finding candidates for the upcoming Ariel mission. This is a role that TESS is well-suited for. Radial velocity follow-up is needed to confirm the…
Understanding the distribution and occurrence rate of small planets was a fundamental goal of the Kepler transiting exoplanet mission, and could be improved with K2 and TESS. Deriving accurate exoplanetary radii requires accurate…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has a goal of detecting small planets orbiting stars bright enough for mass determination via ground-based radial velocity observations. Here we present estimates of how many exoplanets the…
We address three major questions in astronomy, namely the detection of biosignatures on habitable exoplanets, the geophysics of exoplanets and cosmology. To achieve this goal, two requirements are needed. First a very large aperture to…
The Exoplanet Tracker is a prototype of a new type of fibre-fed instrument for performing high precision relative Doppler measurements to detect extra-solar planets. A combination of Michelson interferometer and medium resolution…
Photometric stability is a key requirement for time-resolved spectroscopic observations of transiting extrasolar planets. In the context of the Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory (EChO) mission design, we here present and investigate…
Molecular oxygen is a strong indicator of life on Earth, and may indicate biological processes on exoplanets too. Recent studies proposed that Earth-like O$_\mathrm{2}$ levels might be detectable on nearby exoplanets using high-resolution…
Identifying long-period eclipsing binaries with space-based photometry is still a challenge even in the century of space telescopes due to the relatively short observation sequences and short lifetime of these missions. The Transiting…
One of the persistent complications in searches for transiting exoplanets is the low percentage of the detected candidates that ultimately prove to be planets, which significantly increases the load on the telescopes used for the follow-up…
Eclipsing binaries are important benchmark objects to test and calibrate stellar structure and evolution models. This is especially true for binaries with a fully convective M-dwarf component for which direct measurements of these stars'…
Context. Collecting a large variety of exoplanetary atmosphere measurements is crucial to improve our understanding of exoplanets. In this context, it is likely that the field would benefit from broad species surveys, particularly using…
Photometric surveys such as Kepler have the precision to identify exoplanet and eclipsing binary candidates from only a single transit. K2, with its 75d campaign duration, is ideally suited to detect significant numbers of single-eclipsing…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will observe $\sim$150~million stars brighter than $T_{\rm mag} \approx 16$, with photometric precision from 60~ppm to 3~percent, enabling an array of exoplanet and stellar astrophysics…
The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) survey is a ground-based program designed to search for transiting exoplanets orbiting relatively bright stars. To achieve this, the KELT Science Team operates two planets facilities -…
Context. Hot subdwarfs experienced strong mass loss on the Red Giant Branch (RGB) and are now hot and small He-burning objects. Aims. In this project we aim to perform a transit survey in all available light curves of hot subdwarfs from…
In the late 1990s, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) team conducted the second phase of their long-term monitoring programme, OGLE-II, which since has been superseded by OGLE-III. All the monitoring data of this second…
Kepler, K2, TESS, and similar time-domain photometric projects, while designed with exoplanet detection in mind, are also well-suited projects for searches for large artificial structures orbiting other stars in the Galaxy. An effort to…
In this proceeding, we describe the scientific motivation and technical development of the Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph (CHESS), focusing on the hardware advancements and testing supporting the second flight of the…
SCALES (Slicer Combined with Array of Lenslets for Exoplanet Spectroscopy) is a 2 - 5 micron high-contrast lenslet-based integral field spectrograph (IFS) designed to characterize exoplanets and their atmospheres. The SCALES…
The idea of searching for optical signals from extraterrestrial civilizations has become increasingly popular over the last five years, with dedicated projects at a number of observatories. The method relies on the detection of a brief (few…