Related papers: The Stellar Variability Noise Floor for Transiting…
Clouds and other features in exoplanet and brown dwarf atmospheres cause variations in brightness as they rotate in and out of view. Ground-based instruments reach the high contrasts and small inner working angles needed to monitor these…
[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)…
New observational facilities are beginning to enable insights into the three-dimensional (3D) nature of exoplanets. Transmission spectroscopy is the most widely used method for characterizing transiting temperate exoplanet's atmospheres,…
The disciplines of asteroseismology and extrasolar planet science overlap methodically in the branch of high-precision photometric time series observations. Light curves are, amongst others, useful to measure intrinsic stellar variability…
Lightcurves have long been used to study stellar activity and have more recently become a major tool in the field of exoplanet research. We discuss the various ways in which stellar activity can influence transit lightcurves, and study the…
The next generation of exoplanet space photometry missions proposed by both NASA and ESA promise to discover small transiting planets around the nearest and brightest main-sequence stars. The physical and rotational properties of these…
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…
Traditionally, ground-based spectrophotometric observations probing transiting exoplanet atmospheres have employed a linear map between comparison and target star light curves (e.g. via differential spectrophotometry) to correct for…
We present scope (Simulated CCD Observations for Photometric Experimentation), a Python package to create a forward model of telescope detectors and simulate stellar targets with motion relative to the CCD. The primary application of this…
Astrophysical false positives that mimic planetary transit are one of the main limitation to exoplanet transit surveys. In this proceeding, we review the issue of the false positive in transit survey and the possible complementary…
A poor understanding of the impact of convective turbulence in the outer layers of the Sun and Sun-like stars challenges the advance towards an improved understanding of their internal structure and dynamics. Assessing and calibrating these…
Study Analysis Group 21 (SAG21) of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program Analysis Group (ExoPAG) was organized to study the effect of stellar contamination on space-based transmission spectroscopy, a method for studying exoplanetary…
We quantify the effects of refraction in transit transmission spectroscopy on spectral absorption features and on temporal variations that could be used to obtain altitude-dependent spectra for planets orbiting stars of different stellar…
Context. The interaction of solar oscillations with near surface convection is poorly understood. These interactions are likely the cause of several problems in helio- and astero-seismology, including the so-called surface effect and…
A recent study demonstrated that there is significant covariance structure in the noise on data from ground-based photometric surveys designed to detect transiting extrasolar planets. Such correlation in the noise has often been overlooked,…
Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, those most adequate for life to begin and evolve have been sought. Due to observational bias, however, most of the discovered planets so far are gas giants, precluding their habitability.…
It is shown herein that planets with eccentric orbits are more likely to transit than circularly orbiting planets with the same semimajor axis by a factor of (1-e^2)^{-1}. If the orbital parameters of discovered transiting planets are…
The fine precision of photometric data available from missions like Kepler provide researchers with the ability to measure changes in light on the order of tens of parts per million (ppm). This level of precision allows researchers to…
Currently, over forty transiting planets have been discovered by ground-based photometric surveys, and space-based missions like Kepler and CoRoT are expected to detect hundreds more. Follow-up photometric observations from the ground will…
The gravitational redshift induced by stellar surface gravity is notoriously difficult to measure for non-degenerate stars, since its amplitude is small in comparison with the typical Doppler shift induced by stellar radial velocity. In…