Related papers: Mass Upper Bounds for Over 50 Kepler Planets Using…
When an extrasolar planet passes in front of its star (transits), its radius can be measured from the decrease in starlight and its orbital period from the time between transits. Multiple planets transiting the same star reveal more: period…
The multiple-planet systems discovered by the Kepler mission exhibit the following feature: planet pairs near first-order mean-motion resonances prefer orbits just outside the nominal resonance, while avoiding those just inside the…
Recent transit surveys have discovered thousands of planetary candidates with directly measured radii, but only a small fraction have measured masses. Planetary mass is crucial in assessing the feasibility of numerous observational…
We examine the effect of secular perturbations by giant planets on systems of multiple, lower mass planets orbiting Sun-like stars. We simulate the effects of forcing both eccentricity and inclination, separately and together. We compare…
There are more than 5000 confirmed and validated planets beyond the solar system to date, more than half of which were discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. The catalog of Kepler's exoplanet candidates has only been extensively analyzed…
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…
Kepler-444 is a five planet system around a host-star approximately 11 billion years old. The five transiting planets all have sub-Earth radii and are in a compact configuration with orbital periods between 3 and 10 days. Here we present a…
Recently, the Kepler spacecraft has detected a sizable aggregate of objects, characterized by giant-planet-like radii and modest levels of stellar irradiation. With the exception of a handful of objects, the physical nature, and…
As part of our follow-up campaign of Kepler planets, we observed Kepler-117 with the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence. This F8-type star hosts two transiting planets in non-resonant orbits. The planets, Kepler-117 b…
Few planetary systems have measured mutual inclinations, and even less are found to be non-coplanar. Observing the gravitational interactions between exoplanets is an effective tool to detect non-transiting companions to transiting planets.…
By surveying new fields for the shortest-period "big" planets, the Kepler spacecraft could provide the statistics to more clearly measure the occurrence distributions of giant and medium planets. This would allow separate determinations for…
A re-purposed Kepler mission could continue the search for nearly Earth-sized planets in very short-period (< 1 day) orbits. Recent surveys of the Kepler data already available have revealed at least a dozen such planetary candidates, and a…
Despite the importance of Jupiter and Saturn to Earth's formation and habitability, there has not yet been a comprehensive observational study of how giant exoplanets correlate with the architectural properties of close-in,…
We investigate whether any multi-planet systems among Kepler candidates (2011 February release) can harbor additional terrestrial-mass planets or smaller bodies. We apply the "packed planetary systems" hypothesis that suggests all planetary…
Modern theoretical estimates show that with the help of real equipment we are able to detect large satellites of exoplanets (about the size of the Ganymede), although, numerical attempts of direct exomoon detection were unsuccessful. Lots…
We derive the transit timing variations (TTVs) of two planets near a second order mean motion resonance on nearly circular orbits. We show that the TTVs of each planet are given by sinusoids with a frequency of $j n_2-(j-2)n_1$, where $j…
Unlike hot Jupiters or other gas giants, super-Earths are expected to have a wide variety of compositions, ranging from terrestrial bodies like our own to more gaseous planets like Neptune. Observations of transiting systems, which allow us…
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…
The Kepler Mission has detected dozens of compact planetary systems with more than four transiting planets. This sample provides a collection of close-packed planetary systems with relatively little spread in the inclination angles of the…
While the solar system contains about 20 times more moons than planets, no moon has been confirmed around any of the thousands of extrasolar planets known so far. Tools for an uncomplicated identification of the most promising exomoon…