Related papers: Towards Extremely Precise Radial Velocities: I. Si…
High precision spectrographs might exhibit temporal variations of their reference velocity or nightly zero point (NZP). One way to monitor the NZP is to measure bright stars, which are assumed to have an intrinsic radial velocity variation…
Direct imaging and spectroscopy is the likely means by which we will someday identify, confirm, and characterize an Earth-like planet around a nearby Sun-like star. This Chapter summarizes the current state of knowledge regarding…
The discovery of the short-period giant exoplanet population, the so-called hot Jupiter population, and their link to brown dwarfs and low-mass stars challenges the conventional view of planet formation and evolution. We took advantage of…
Radial velocity perturbations induced by stellar surface inhomogeneities including spots, plages and granules currently limit the detection of Earth-twins using Doppler spectroscopy. Such stellar noise is poorly understood for stars other…
We briefly overview the new features of PlanetPack2, the forthcoming update of PlanetPack, which is a software tool for exoplanets detection and characterization from Doppler radial velocity data. Among other things, this major update…
The Doppler effect is commonly used to infer the velocity difference between stars based on the relative shifts in the rest-frame wavelengths of their spectral features. In dynamically-cold systems with a low velocity dispersion, such as…
The masses and radii of extrasolar planets are key observables for understanding their interior, formation and evolution. While transit photometry and Doppler spectroscopy are used to measure the radii and masses respectively of planets…
The space missions MOST, COROT and Kepler are going to provide us with high-precision optical photometry of solar-like stars with time series extending from tens of days to several years. They can be modelled to obtain information on…
Although instruments for measuring the radial velocities (RVs) of stars now routinely reach sub-meter per second accuracy, the detection of low-mass planets is still very challenging. The rotational modulation and evolution of spots and/or…
(Abridged) Searching for planets around stars with different masses probes the outcome of planetary formation for different initial conditions. This drives observations of a sample of 102 southern nearby M dwarfs, using a fraction of our…
Due to the exquisite photometric precision, transiting exoplanet discoveries from the Kepler mission are enabling several new techniques of confirmation and characterization. One of these newly accessible techniques analyzes the phase…
We present an analysis of Sun-as-a-star observations from four different high-resolution, stabilized spectrographs -- HARPS, HARPS-N, EXPRES, and NEID. With simultaneous observations of the Sun from four different instruments, we are able…
Transmission spectroscopy during planetary transits is expected to be a major source of information on the atmospheres of small (approximately Earth-sized) exoplanets in the next two decades. This technique, however, is intrinsically…
Doppler spectroscopy has uncovered or confirmed all the known planets orbiting nearby stars. Two main techniques are used to obtain precision Doppler measurements at optical wavelengths. The first approach is the gas cell method, which…
We use Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the number of extrasolar planets that are directly detectable in the solar-neighborhood using current and forthcoming high-contrast imaging instruments. Our calculations take into account the…
High contrast direct imaging of exoplanets can provide many important observables, including measurements of the orbit, spectra that probe the lower layers of the atmosphere, and phase variations of the planet, but cannot directly measure…
The discovery of the first extra-solar planet surrounding a main-sequence star was announced in 1995, based on very precise radial velocity (Doppler) measurements. A total of 34 such planets were known by the end of March 2000, and their…
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…
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…
Tens of thousands of solar-like oscillating stars have been observed by space missions. Their photometric variability in the Fourier domain can be parameterized by a sum of two super-Lorentizian functions for granulation and a…