Related papers: SPECULOOS -- Ultracool Dwarf Transit Survey: Targe…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an all-sky survey mission designed to find transiting exoplanets orbiting nearby bright stars. It has identified more than 329 transiting exoplanets, and almost 6,000 candidates remain…
Extrasolar planet searches targeting very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are hampered by intrinsic or instrumental limitations. Time series of astrometric measurements with precisions better than one milli-arcsecond can yield new evidence…
The critical first step in the search for life on exoplanets over the next decade is to determine whether rocky planets transiting small M-dwarf stars possess atmospheres and, if so, what processes sculpt them over time. Because of its…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will provide an opportunity to investigate the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets. Aerosols, significantly mute molecular features in transit spectra because they prevent light from probing…
We present the results of a medium resolution optical spectroscopic survey of 92 cool ($3,000 \lesssim T_{\rm eff} \lesssim 4,500\,$K) southern TESS candidate planet hosts, and describe our spectral fitting methodology used to recover…
The TRAPPIST-1 system is a priority target for terrestrial exoplanet characterization. TRAPPIST-1e, residing in the habitable zone, will be observed during the JWST GTO Program. Here, we assess the prospects of differentiating between…
Surveys for nearby low-luminosity dwarfs tend to avoid the crowded regions of the Galactic Plane. We have devised near-infrared colour-magnitude and colour-colour selection criteria designed to identify late-type M and early-type L dwarfs…
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…
M dwarfs are the most common type of star in the Galaxy, and because of their small size are favored targets for searches of Earth-sized transiting exoplanets. Current and upcoming all-sky spectroscopic surveys, such as the Large Sky Area…
TRAPPIST-1 is a nearby ultra-cool dwarf that is host to a remarkable planetary system consisting of seven transiting planets. The orbital properties and radii of the planets have been well-constrained, and recently the masses of the inner…
Star-like objects with effective temperatures of less than 2,700 kelvin are referred to as ultracool dwarfs. This heterogeneous group includes stars of extremely low mass as well as brown dwarfs (substellar objects not massive enough to…
The ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 hosts seven Earth-size transiting planets, some of which could harbour liquid water on their surfaces. UV observations are essential to measure their high-energy irradiation, and to search for…
By targeting nearby M dwarfs, a transit search using modest equipment is capable of discovering planets as small as 2 Earth radii in the habitable zones of their host stars. The MEarth Project, a future transit search, aims to employ a…
The near-term search for life beyond the solar system currently focuses on transiting planets orbiting small M dwarfs, and the challenges of detecting signs of life in their atmospheres. However, planets orbiting white dwarfs (WDs) would…
Today's most detailed characterization of exoplanet atmospheres is accessible via transit spectroscopy (TS). Detecting transiting exoplanets only yields their size, and it is thus standard to measure a planet's mass before moving towards…
The findings of more than 350 extrasolar planets, most of them nontransiting Hot Jupiters, have revealed correlations between the metallicity of the main-sequence (MS) host stars and planetary incidence. This connection can be used to…
Transiting planet systems offer an unique opportunity to observationally constrain proposed models of the interiors (radius, composition) and atmospheres (chemistry, dynamics) of extrasolar planets. The spectacular successes of ground-based…
Small planets are extremely common in the Galaxy, including planets with masses and radii between those of Earth and Neptune. Characterizing these planets' masses requires ultra-precise radial velocities. The ESPRESSO spectrograph was…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will revolutionize our understanding of exoplanets with transit spectroscopy of a wide range of mature planets close to their host stars ($<$2 AU) and with coronagraphic imaging and spectroscopy of…