Related papers: Orbital obliquity sampling in the Kepler-20 system…
Here we show how to determine the orbital parameters of a system composed of a star and N companions (that can be planets, brown-dwarfs or other stars), using a simple Fourier analysis of the radial velocity data of the star. This method…
Kepler will monitor a sufficient number of stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the exquisite Kepler photometry of such transits with precise…
(Abridged) The solar system gas giant planets are oblate due to their rapid rotation. A measurement of the planet's projected oblateness would constrain the planet's rotational period. Planets that are synchronously rotating with their…
This paper describes a simple activity for plotting and characterizing the light curve from an exoplanet transit event by way of differential photometry analysis. Using free digital imaging software, participants analyse a series of…
Context. We present a model-free method for mapping surface brightness variations. Aims. We aim to develop a method that is not dependent on either stellar atmosphere models or limb-darkening equation. This method is optimized for exoplanet…
Doppler orbitography uses the Doppler shift in a transmitted signal to determine the orbital parameters of satellites including range and range-rate (or radial velocity). We describe two techniques for atmospheric-limited optical Doppler…
The Kepler mission has provided high-accurate photometric data in a long time span for more than two hundred thousands stars, looking for planetary transits. Among the detected candidates, the planetary nature of around 15% has been…
In the past decade, hundreds of asteroid shape models have been derived using the lightcurve inversion method. At the same time, a new framework of 3-D shape modeling based on the combined analysis of widely different data sources such as…
This thesis consists of seven scientific papers that cover the proof-of-concept, the development, and discoveries made through the use of the BEER (BEaming, Ellipsoidal, and Reflection) algorithm for searching for companions in the light…
High-multiplicity Kepler systems (referred to as Kepler multis) are often tightly packed and may be on the verge of instability. Many systems of this type could have experienced past instabilities, where the compact orbits and often low…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
The Kepler-11 star hosts at least six transiting super-Earth planets detected through the precise photometric observations of the Kepler mission (Lissauer et al.). In this paper, we re-analyze the available Kepler data, using the direct…
The Sun's equator and the planets' orbital planes are nearly aligned, which is presumably a consequence of their formation from a single spinning gaseous disk. For exoplanetary systems this well-aligned configuration is not guaranteed:…
A microlensing exoplanet search is a unique method for finding planets orbiting distant stars. However, in the past, the method used to analyze microlensing data could not deal with complex lens systems. The number of lenses was limited…
A question that continues to perplex astronomers is the formation of tight stellar binaries. There is too much angular momentum in a collapsing and fragmenting protostellar cloud to form a stellar binary in situ with a separation less than…
In the exoplanetary era, the Kepler spacecraft is causing a revolution by discovering thousands of new planet candidates. However, a follow up program is needed in order to reject false candidates and to fully characterize the bona-fide…
The radial velocity technique is currently used to classify transiting objects. While capable of identifying grazing binary eclipses, this technique cannot reliably identify blends, a chance overlap of a faint background eclipsing binary…
The Kepler space mission discovered about a dozen planets orbiting around binary stars systems. Most of these circumbinary planets lie near their instability boundaries at about 3 to 5 binary separations. Past attempts to match these final…
Recent work has shown that the planets in the $Kepler$ Mission's population of multi-transiting systems show surprising uniformity in both mass and radius. In this brief note, I show that this intra-system mass uniformity extends to…
The transit method, employed by MOST, \emph{Kepler}, and various ground-based surveys has enabled the characterization of extrasolar planets to unprecedented precision. These results are precise enough to begin to measure planet atmosphere…