Related papers: Implicit biases in transit models using stellar ps…
Statistical analyses of large surveys for transiting planets such as the Kepler mission must account for systematic errors and biases. Transit detection depends not only on the planet's radius and orbital period, but also on host star…
Observational biases distort our view of nature, such that the patterns we see within a surveyed population of interest are often unrepresentative of the truth we seek. Transiting planets currently represent the most informative data set on…
Planets on eccentric orbits have a higher geometric probability of transiting their host star. By application of Bayes' theorem, we reverse this logic to show that the eccentricity distribution of transiting planets is positively biased.…
The Kepler mission discovery of candidate transiting exoplanets (KOIs) enables a plethora of ensemble analysis of the architecture and properties of exoplanetary systems. We compare the observed transit durations of KOIs to a synthetic…
Exoplanetary science heavily relies on transit depth ($D$) measurements. Yet, as instrumental precision increases, the uncertainty on $D$ appears to increasingly drift from expectations driven solely by photon-noise. Here we characterize…
Wide-field surveys for transiting planets, such as the NASA Kepler and TESS missions, are usually conducted without knowing which stars have binary companions. Unresolved and unrecognized binaries give rise to systematic errors in planet…
Limb-darkening is fundamental in determining transit lightcurve shapes, and is typically modeled by a variety of laws that parametrize the intensity profile of the star that is being transited. Confronted with a transit lightcurve, some…
We present an efficient analytical method to predict the maximum transit timing variations of a circumbinary exoplanet, given some basic parameters of the host binary. We derive an analytical model giving limits on the potential location of…
Doppler planet searches have discovered that giant planets follow orbits with a wide range of orbital eccentricities, revolutionizing theories of planet formation. The discovery of hundreds of exoplanet candidates by NASA's Kepler mission…
Intrinsic stellar variability can hinder the detection of shallow transits, particularly in space-based data. Therefore, this variability has to be filtered out before running the transit search. Unfortunately, filtering out the low…
Knowledge of an exoplanet's oblateness and obliquity would give clues about its formation and internal structure. In principle, a light curve of a transiting planet bears information about the planet's shape, but previous work has shown…
We describe a new metric that uses machine learning to determine if a periodic signal found in a photometric time series appears to be shaped like the signature of a transiting exoplanet. This metric uses dimensionality reduction and…
The determination of an exoplanet as rocky is critical for the assessment of planetary habitability. Observationally, the number of small-radius, transiting planets with accompanying mass measurements is insufficient for a robust…
The properties of a transiting planet's host star are written in its transit light curve. The light curve can reveal the stellar density and the limb darkening profile in addition to the characteristics of the planet and its orbit. For…
A planet's orbital eccentricity is fundamental to understanding the present dynamical state of a system and is a relic of its formation history. There is high scientific value in measuring eccentricities of Kepler and TESS planets given the…
It is shown herein that planets with eccentric orbits are more likely to transit than circularly orbiting planets with the same semimajor axis by a factor of (1-e^2)^{-1}. If the orbital parameters of discovered transiting planets are…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…
Of the nearby transiting exoplanets that are amenable to detailed study, TrES-2 is both the most massive and has the largest impact parameter. We present z-band photometry of three transits of TrES-2. We improve upon the estimates of the…
Astrophysical false positives that mimic planetary transit are one of the main limitation to exoplanet transit surveys. In this proceeding, we review the issue of the false positive in transit survey and the possible complementary…
For extrasolar planets with orbital periods, P>10 days, radial velocity surveys find non-circular orbital eccentricities are common, <e>~0.3. Future surveys for extrasolar planets using the transit technique will also have sensitivity to…