Related papers: Optimized cutting off transit algorithm to study s…
Some pulsating stars are good clocks. When they are found in binary stars, the frequencies of their luminosity variations are modulated by the Doppler effect caused by orbital motion. For each pulsation frequency this manifests itself as a…
We introduce a special class of functions for mathematical modeling of periodic signals of special shape with irregularly spaced arguments. This method was developed for determination of phenomenological characteristics of the light curves,…
We explore how finite integration times or equivalently temporal binning induces morphological distortions to the transit light-curve. These distortions, if uncorrected for, lead to the retrieval of erroneous system parameters and may even…
One of the main science motivations for the ESA PLAnetary Transit and Oscillations (PLATO) mission is to measure exoplanet transit radii with 3% precision. In addition to flares and starspots, stellar oscillations and granulation will…
Planetary transits provide a unique opportunity to investigate the surface distributions of star spots. Our aim is to determine if, with continuous observation (such as the data that will be provided by the Kepler mission), we can in…
One of the biggest challenges facing large transit surveys is the elimination of false-positives from the vast number of transit candidates. We investigate to what extent information from the lightcurves can identify blend scenarios and…
The increasing number of transiting exoplanets sparked a significant interest in discovering their moons. Most of the methods in the literature utilize timing analysis of the raw light curves. Here we propose a new approach for the direct…
[Abridged] Context. Stellar activity is an important source of systematic errors and uncertainties in the characterization of exoplanets. Most of the techniques used to correct for this activity focus on an ad hoc data reduction. Aims. We…
To date a dozen transiting "Tatooines" or circumbinary planets (CBPs) have been discovered, by eye, in the data from the Kepler mission; by contrast, thousands of confirmed circumstellar planets orbiting around single stars have been…
Research into light curves from stars (temporal variation of brightness) has completely changed how exoplanets are discovered or characterised. This study including star light curves from the Kepler dataset as a way to discover exoplanets…
We present an efficient analytical method to predict the maximum transit timing variations of a circumbinary exoplanet, given some basic parameters of the host binary. We derive an analytical model giving limits on the potential location of…
A planetary transit produces both a photometric signal and a spectroscopic signal. Precise observations of the transit light curve reveal the planetary radius and allow a search for timing anomalies caused by satellites or additional…
We present the Transiting Exoearth Robust Reduction Algorithm (TERRA) --- a novel framework for identifying and removing instrumental noise in Kepler photometry. We identify instrumental noise modes by finding common trends in a large…
Transits of habitable planets around solar-like stars are expected to be shallow, and to have long periods, which means low information content. The current bottleneck in the detection of such transits is caused in large part by the…
The Wide Field Camera Transit Survey is a pioneer program aimed to search for extra-solar planets in the near-infrared. The standard data reduction pipeline of the program uses aperture photometry to construct the light curves. We…
Strong variations of any kind and causes within a stellar light curve may prohibit the detection of transits, particularly of faint or shallow transits caused by small planets passing in front of the stellar disk. The success of future…
In this paper, we determine the detectability of eclipsing binary star companions from eclipse timing variations using the Kepler mission dataset. Extensive and precise stellar time-series photometry from space-based missions enable…
The mutual orbital alignment in multiple planetary systems is an important parameter for understanding their formation. There are a number of elaborate techniques to determine the alignment parameters using photometric or spectroscopic…
We present exact analytic formulae for the eclipse of a star described by quadratic or nonlinear limb darkening. In the limit that the planet radius is less than a tenth of the stellar radius, we show that the exact lightcurve can be well…
We study the statistical characteristics of a box-fitting algorithm to analyze stellar photometric time series in the search for periodic transits by extrasolar planets. The algorithm searches for signals characterized by a periodic…