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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…
We propose an extension of umbrella sampling in which the pertinent range of states is subdivided in windows that are sampled consecutively and linked together. Extrapolating results from one window we estimate a weight function for the…
There is a unique solution of the planet and star parameters from a planet transit light curve with two or more transits if the planet has a circular orbit and the light curve is observed in a band pass where limb darkening is negligible.…
We commonly encounter the problem of identifying an optimally weight adjusted version of the empirical distribution of observed data, adhering to predefined constraints on the weights. Such constraints often manifest as restrictions on the…
Transiting extrasolar planets are now discovered jointly by photometric surveys and by radial velocimetry. We want to determine whether the different data sets are compatible between themselves and with models of the evolution of extrasolar…
Future surveys for transiting extrasolar planets, including the space-based mission Kepler (Borucki et al 2003), are expected to detect hundreds of Jovian mass planets and tens of terrestrial mass planets. For many of these newly discovered…
We propose a novel approach to utilize low-cadence photometric surveys for exoplanetary transit search. Even if transits are undetectable in the survey database alone, it can still be useful for finding preferred times for directed…
Eclipsing binaries provide one of the most direct mechanisms for measuring stellar properties such as mass and radius, but historically, determining these properties has been non-trivial and computationally prohibitive. As such, only a…
The determination of the abundance of volatiles in extrasolar planets is very important as it can provide constraints on transport in protoplanetary disks and on the formation location of planets. However, constraining the internal…
In this paper, we present a novel approach to fitting mixture models based on estimating first the posterior distribution of the auxiliary variables that assign each observation to a group in the mixture. The posterior distributions of the…
Estimation of planetary orbital and physical parameters from light-curve data relies heavily on the accurate interpretation of Transit Timing Variations (TTV) measurements. In this letter, we review the process of TTV measurement and…
Sampling is a fundamental problem in computer science and statistics. However, for a given task and stream, it is often not possible to choose good sampling probabilities in advance. We derive a general framework for adaptively changing the…
In current models used to interpret exoplanet atmospheric observations, the planet mass is treated as a prior and is estimated independently with external methods, such as RV or TTV techniques. This approach is necessary as available…
Exoplanet transit and Doppler surveys discover many binary stars during their operation that can be used to conduct a variety of ancillary science. Specifically, eclipsing binary stars can be used to study the stellar mass-radius…
Monte Carlo integration is a powerful tool for scientific and statistical computation, but faces significant challenges when the integrand is a multi-modal distribution, even when the mode locations are known. This work introduces novel…
We propose a new method for investigating atmospheric inhomogeneities in exoplanets through transmission spectroscopy. Our approach links chromatic variations in conventional transit model parameters (central transit time, total and full…
The era of exoplanet characterization is upon us. For a subset of exoplanets -- the transiting planets -- physical properties can be measured, including mass, radius, and atmosphere characteristics. Indeed, measuring the atmospheres of a…
The most productive tracer of exoplanetary atmospheric escape is the measurement of excess absorption in the near-infrared metastable helium triplet during transits. Atmospheric escape of a close-in planet's atmosphere plays a role in its…
We introduce a new machine learning based technique to detect exoplanets using the transit method. Machine learning and deep learning techniques have proven to be broadly applicable in various scientific research areas. We aim to exploit…
Clouds have been shown to be present in many exoplanetary atmospheres. Cloud formation modeling predicts considerable inhomogeneities of cloud cover, consistent with optical phase curve observations. However, optical phase curves cannot…