Related papers: Confirming known planetary trends using a photomet…
The precise radial velocity technique is a cornerstone of exoplanetary astronomy. Astronomers measure Doppler shifts in the star's spectral features, which track the line-of/sight gravitational accelerations of a star caused by the planets…
In the blooming field of exoplanetary science, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets. Kepler's very precise and long-duration photometry is ideal for detecting planetary transits around Sun-like…
Astrometric data from the recent Gaia Data Release 1 has been matched against the sample of stars from Kepler with known rotation periods. A total of 1,299 bright rotating stars were recovered from the subset of Gaia sources with good…
Context. The third Gaia Data Release, which includes BP/RP spectra for 219 million sources, has opened a new window in the exploration of the chemical history and evolution of the Milky Way. The wealth of information encapsulated in these…
The formation and evolution of planetary systems are linked to their host stellar environment. In this study, we employ a pebble accretion-based planet population synthesis model to explore the correlation between planetary properties and…
The widespread prevalence of close-in, nearly coplanar super-Earth- and sub-Neptune-sized planets in multiple-planet systems was one of the most surprising results from the Kepler mission. By studying a uniform sample of Kepler "multis"…
Recent astronomical observations, in particular from the Kepler and TESS missions and their related follow-ups, have revealed an abundance of exoplanets in the size range between Neptune (4 Earth radii) and Earth (1 Earth radii ), as well…
Statistical analyses of large surveys for transiting planets such as the Kepler mission must account for systematic errors and biases. Transit detection depends not only on the planet's radius and orbital period, but also on host star…
We initiated the Robo-AO Kepler Planetary Candidate Survey in 2012 to observe each Kepler exoplanet candidate host star with high-angular-resolution visible-light laser-adaptive-optics imaging. Our goal is to find nearby stars lying in…
We present new UV-to-IR stellar photometry of four low-extinction windows in the Galactic bulge, obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Using our five bandpasses, we have defined reddening-free…
The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) has observed $\sim$600 transiting exoplanets and exoplanet candidates from \textit{Kepler} (Kepler Objects of Interest, KOIs), most with $\geq$18 epochs. The combined…
This note describes an effort to detect additional stellar sources in known transiting exoplanet (TEP) systems, which are unresolved or barely resolved in the Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) catalogue. The presence of multiple unresolved stars in…
In this thesis, I explore two topics in exoplanet science. The first is the prevalence of Earth-size planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. To determine the occurrence of planets having different sizes, orbital periods, and other properties, I…
We present a new framework to characterize the occurrence rates of planet candidates identified by Kepler based on hierarchical Bayesian modeling, Approximate Bayesian Computing (ABC), and sequential importance sampling. For this study we…
A space telescope capable of high-contrast imaging has been recognized as the avenue toward finding terrestrial planets around nearby Sun-like stars and characterizing their potential habitability. It is thus essential to quantify the…
We use detailed simulations of the Gaia observations of synthetic planetary systems and develop and utilize independent software codes in double-blind mode to analyze the data, including statistical tools for planet detection and different…
Theoretical studies of giant planet formation suggest that substantial quantities of metals - elements heavier than hydrogen and helium - can be delivered by solid accretion during the envelope-assembly phase. This metal enhancement process…
By surveying new fields for the shortest-period "big" planets, the Kepler spacecraft could provide the statistics to more clearly measure the occurrence distributions of giant and medium planets. This would allow separate determinations for…
Since its launch in 2013, the Gaia space telescope has provided precise measurements of the positions and magnitudes of over 1 billion stars. This has enabled extensive searches for stellar and sub-stellar companions through astrometric and…
We present refined values for the physical parameters of transiting exoplanets, based on a self-consistent and uniform analysis of transit light curves and the observable properties of the host stars. Previously it has been difficult to…