Related papers: Transit Light-curves for Exomoons: Analytical Form…
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…
This contribution focuses on the design of low-energy transfers between planetary moons and presents an efficient technique to compute trajectories characterized by desirable behaviors in the vicinities of the departure and destination…
The circumplanetary environments in our Solar System host a stunning array of moon and ring systems. Study of these environs has yielded valuable insights into planetary system formation and evolution, and there is every reason to believe…
I conducted differential photometry on a star GSC 3281-0800, a known host to exoplanet HAT-P-32b, using analysis software AstroImageJ. I plotted the measurements from a series of images taken during the transit, via ADU count given from an…
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…
In the last decade, over a million stars were monitored to detect transiting planets. Manual interpretation of potential exoplanet candidates is labor intensive and subject to human error, the results of which are difficult to quantify.…
We present a novel method for direct detection and characterization of exoplanets from space. This method uses four collecting telescopes, combined with phase chopping and a spectrometer, with observations on only a few baselines rather…
Context. The photometric signal we receive from a star hosting a planet is modulated by the variation of the planet signal with its orbital phase. Such phase variations are observed for transiting hot Jupiters with current instrumentation,…
Exoplanetary atmospheric observations require an exquisite precision in the measurement of the relative flux among wavelengths. In this paper, we aim to provide a new adaptive method to treat light curves before fitting transit parameters…
Nearly everything we know about extrasolar planets to date comes from optical astronomy. While exoplanetary aurorae are predicted to be bright at low radio frequencies (< 1 GHz), we consider the effect of an exoplanet transit on radio…
Direct imaging of exoplanets presents both significant challenges and significant gains. The advantages primarily lie in receiving emitted and, with future instruments, reflected photons at phase angles not accessible by other techniques,…
Observations of exoplanet transit spectra are essential to understanding the physics and chemistry of distant worlds. The effects of opacity sources and many physical processes combine to set the shape of a transit spectrum. Two such key…
The combination of high-contrast imaging and medium to high spectral resolution spectroscopy offers new possibilities for the detection and characterization of exoplanets. The molecular mapping technique uses the difference between the…
More than 450 exoplanets are known and this number increases nearly every day. Only a few constraints on their orbital parameters and physical characteristics can be determined, as most exoplanets are detected indirectly. Measuring the…
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…
The discovery of over 200 extrasolar planets with the radial velocity (RV) technique has revealed that many giant planets have large eccentricities, in striking contrast with most of the planets in the solar system and prior theories of…
We are at a unique timeline in the history of human evolution where we may be able to discover earth-like planets around stars outside our solar system where conditions can support life or even find evidence of life on those planets. With…
The Wide Field Camera Transit Survey is a pioneer program aimed to search for extra-solar planets in the near-infrared. The standard data reduction pipeline of the program uses aperture photometry to construct the light curves. We…
Transiting planet systems offer an unique opportunity to observationally constrain proposed models of the interiors (radius, composition) and atmospheres (chemistry, dynamics) of extrasolar planets. The spectacular successes of ground-based…
We consider the effects of mutual transits by extrasolar planet-companion systems (in a true binary or a planet-satellite system) on light curves. We show that induced changes in light curves depend strongly on a ratio between a…