Related papers: Stellar activity and transits
Stellar magnetism, explorable via polarimetry, is a crucial driver of activity, ionization, photodissociation, chemistry and winds in stellar environments. Thus it has an important impact on the atmospheres and magnetospheres of surrounding…
The Sun and stars with low magnetic activity levels, become photometrically brighter when their activity increases. Magnetically more active stars display the opposite behaviour and get fainter when their activity increases. We reproduce…
Chromospherically sensitive atomic lines display different spectra in stellar active regions, spots, and the photosphere, raising the possibility that exoplanet transmission spectra are contaminated by the contrast between various portions…
Stellar flares, winds and coronal mass ejections form the space weather. They are signatures of the magnetic activity of cool stars and, since activity varies with age, mass and rotation, the space weather that extra-solar planets…
Accurately modeling effects from stellar activity is a key step in detecting radial velocity signals of low-mass and long-period exoplanets. Radial velocities from stellar activity are dominated by magnetic active regions that move in and…
The rotation rate of a star has important implications for the detectability, characterisation and stability of any planets that may be orbiting it. This chapter gives a brief overview of stellar rotation before describing the methods used…
A transiting planet eclipses part of the rotating stellar surface, thereby producing an anomalous Doppler shift of the stellar spectrum. Here I review how this "Rossiter-McLaughlin Effect" can be used to characterize exoplanetary systems.…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
One of the persistent complications in searches for transiting exoplanets is the low percentage of the detected candidates that ultimately prove to be planets, which significantly increases the load on the telescopes used for the follow-up…
Analyzing exoplanets detected by radial velocity or transit observations, we determine the multiplicity of exoplanet host stars in order to study the influence of a stellar companion on the properties of planet candidates. Matching the host…
We describe three useful applications of asteroseismology in the context of exoplanet science: (1) the detailed characterisation of exoplanet host stars; (2) the measurement of stellar inclinations; and (3) the determination of orbital…
Observations of stellar surfaces - except for the Sun - are hampered by their tiny angular extent, while observed spectral lines are smeared by averaging over the stellar surface, and by stellar rotation. Exoplanet transits can be used to…
Phase curves, or the change in observed illumination of the planet as it orbits around its host star, help us to characterize their atmospheres. However, the variability of the host star can make their detection challenging: the presence of…
The detected exoplanet population displays a dearth of planets with sizes of about two Earth radii, the so-called radius gap. This is interpreted as an evolutionary effect driven by a variety of possible atmospheric mass loss processes of…
The architecture of exoplanetary systems is often different from the solar system, with some exoplanets being in close orbits around their host stars and having orbital periods of only a few days. In analogy to interactions between stars in…
Short-orbit gas giant planet formation/evolution mechanisms are still not well understood. One promising pathway to discriminate between mechanisms is to constrain the occurrence rate of these peculiar exoplanets at the earliest stage of…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect is the distortion of stellar spectral lines that occurs during eclipses or transits, due to stellar rotation. We assess the future prospects for using the RM effect to measure the alignment of planetary…
[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…
I present a review of observational efforts to study known extrasolar planets by methods that are complementary to the radial velocity technique. I describe the current state of attempts to detect and characterize such planets by…
Recently, many Earth-sized planets have been discovered around stars other than the Sun that might possess appropriate conditions for life. The development of theoretical methods for assessing the putative habitability of these worlds is of…