Related papers: The Exomoon Corridor for Multiple Moon Systems
Both ground and space-based transit observatories are poised to significantly increase the number of known transiting planets and the number of precisely measured transit times. The variation in a planet's transit times may be used to infer…
Targeted observations of possible exomoon host systems will remain difficult to obtain and time-consuming to analyze in the foreseeable future. As such, time-domain surveys such as Kepler, K2 and TESS will continue to play a critical role…
The highest priority recommendation of the Astro2020 Decadal Survey for space-based astronomy was the construction of an observatory capable of characterizing habitable worlds. In this paper series we explore the detectability of and…
Transit timing variations provide a powerful tool for confirming and characterizing transiting planets, as well as detecting non-transiting planets. We report the results an updated TTV analysis for 1481 planet candidates (Borucki et al.…
Despite years of high accuracy observations, none of the available theoretical techniques has yet allowed the confirmation of a moon beyond the solar system. Methods are currently limited to masses about an order of magnitude higher than…
Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) can be induced by a range of physical phenomena, including planet-planet interactions, planet-moon interactions, and stellar activity. Recent work has shown that roughly half of moons would induce fast TTVs…
Many attempts have already been made for detecting exomoons around transiting exoplanets but the first confirmed discovery is still pending. The experience that have been gathered so far allow us to better optimize future space telescopes…
Transit timing variations (TTVs) are observed for exoplanets at a range of amplitudes and periods, yielding an ostensibly degenerate forest of possible explanations. We offer some clarity in this forest, showing that systems with a distant…
Transit timing variation (TTV) provides rich information about the mass and orbital properties of exoplanets, which are often obtained by solving an inverse problem via Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). In this paper, we design a new…
Exoplanet discoveries have motivated numerous efforts to find unseen populations of exomoons, yet they have been unsuccessful. A plausible explanation is that most discovered planets are located on close-in orbits, which would make their…
Among other things, studies of the formation and evolution of planetary systems currently draw on two important observational resources: the precise characterization available for planets that transit their parent stars and the frequency…
The number of known transiting exoplanets is rapidly increasing, which has recently inspired significant interest as to whether they can host a detectable moon. Although there has been no such example where the presence of a satellite was…
Following on from Paper I in our series (Xie 2013), we report the confirmation by Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) of a further 30 planets in 15 multiple planet systems, using the publicly available Kepler light curves (Q0-Q16). All of…
Context: The Solar System giant planets harbour a wide variety of moons. Moons around exoplanets are plausibly similarly abundant, even though most of them are likely too small to be easily detectable with modern instruments. Moons are…
In our previous paper, we evaluated the transit duration variation (TDV) effect for a co-aligned planet-moon system at an orbital inclination of i=90 degrees. Here, we will consider the effect for the more general case of i <= 90 degrees…
We present a new method for confirming transiting planets based on the combination of transit timingn variations (TTVs) and dynamical stability. Correlated TTVs provide evidence that the pair of bodies are in the same physical system.…
Context: Detecting moons around exoplanets is a major goal of current and future observatories. Moons are suspected to influence rocky exoplanet habitability, and gaseous exoplanets in stellar habitable zones could harbour abundant and…
The Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) technique provides a powerful tool to detect additional planets in transiting exoplanetary systems. In this paper we show how transiting planets with significant TTVs can be systematically missed, or…
Satellites of extrasolar planets, or exomoons, are on the frontier of detectability using current technologies and theoretical constraints should be considered in their search. In this Letter, we apply theoretical constraints of orbital…
One of the simplest ways to identify an exoplanetary transit is to phase fold a photometric time series upon a trial period - leading to a coherent stack when using the correct value. Such phase-folded transits have become a standard data…