Related papers: Planets around young active Solar-type stars: Asse…

The precise Doppler method for measuring stellar radial velocities (RV) is a fundamental technique in modern astronomy. This method records a star's spectrum and detects periodic Doppler shifts in its spectral features, which indicate the…

Exoplanets, or planets outside our own solar system, have long been of interest to astronomers; however, only in the past two decades have scientists had the technology to characterize and study planets so far away from us. With advanced…

Exoplanet orbital eccentricities offer valuable clues about the history of planetary systems. Eccentric, Jupiter-sized planets are particularly interesting: they may link the "cold" Jupiters beyond the ice line to close-in hot Jupiters,…

At the dawn of the first discovery of exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars in the mid-1990s, few believed that observations of exoplanet atmospheres would ever be possible. After the 2002 Hubble Space Telescope detection of a transiting…

Young associations in star forming regions are stellar systems that allow us to understand the mechanisms that characterise the stars in their early life and what happens around them. In particular, the analysis of the disks and of the…

The first transiting extrasolar planet, orbiting HD209458, was a Doppler wobble planet before its transits were discovered with a 10 cm CCD camera. Wide-angle CCD cameras, by monitoring in parallel the light curves of tens of thousands of…

This white paper discusses a repurposed mission for the Kepler spacecraft that focusses on solving outstanding problems in planet formation and evolution by targeting the study of the hot Jupiter population of young stars. This mission can…

Young Moving Groups (YMGs) are close (<100pc), coherent collections of young (<100Myr) stars that appear to have formed in the same star-forming molecular cloud. As such we would expect their individual initial mass functions (IMFs) to be…

Planets interact with their host stars through gravity, radiation and magnetic fields, and for those giant planets that orbit their stars within ~10 stellar radii (~0.1 AU for a sun-like star), star-planet interactions (SPI) are observable…

The abundance and properties of planets orbiting binary stars - circumbinary planets - are largely unknown because they are difficult to detect with currently available techniques. Results from the Kepler satellite and other studies…

We show that stars with transiting planets for which the stellar obliquity is large are preferentially hot (T_eff > 6250 K). This could explain why small obliquities were observed in the earliest measurements, which focused on relatively…

In the last two decades, thousands of extrasolar planets were discovered based on different observational techniques, and their number must increase substantially in virtue of the ongoing and near-future approved missions and facilities. It…

Population studies of exoplanets are key to unlocking their statistical properties. So far the inferred properties have been mostly limited to planetary, orbital and stellar parameters extracted from, e.g., Kepler, radial velocity, and GAIA…

Specially-designed microlensing searches, some of which have been underway for several years, are sensitive to extrasolar planets orbiting the most common stars in our Galaxy. Microlensing is particularly well-suited to the detection of…

Spectrographs like HARPS can now reach a sub-m/s precision in radial-velocity (RV) (Pepe & Lovis 2008). At this level of accuracy, we start to be confronted with stellar noise produced by 3 different physical phenomena: oscillations,…

In recent years a paradigm shift has occurred in exoplanet science, wherein low-mass stars are increasingly viewed as a foundational pillar of the search for potentially habitable worlds in the solar neighborhood. However, the formation…

We have carried out a survey of X-ray emission from stars with giant planets, combining both archival and targeted surveys. Over 230 stars have been currently identified as possessing planets, and roughly a third of these have been detected…

Models are developed to simulate lightcurves of stars dimmed by transiting exoplanets with and without rings. These models are then applied to \textit{Kepler} photometry to search for planetary rings in a sample of 21 exoplanets, mostly hot…

A variety of terrestrial planets with different physical parameters and exotic atmospheres might plausibly exist outside our Solar System, waiting to be detected by the next generation of space-exploration missions. Some of these planets…

To date, only 18 exoplanets with radial velocity (RV) semi-amplitudes $<2$ m/s have had their masses directly constrained. The biggest obstacle to RV detection of such exoplanets is variability intrinsic to stars themselves, e.g. nuisance…