Related papers: Discovering planets with PLATO: Comparison of algo…
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…
Aims. With the purpose of determining the orbital parameters of exoplanetary systems from observational data, we have developed a software, named TRADES (TRAnsits and Dynamics of Exoplanetary Systems), to simultaneously fit observed radial…
Currently, over forty transiting planets have been discovered by ground-based photometric surveys, and space-based missions like Kepler and CoRoT are expected to detect hundreds more. Follow-up photometric observations from the ground will…
Transit timing variations (TTVs) can provide useful information for systems observed by transit, as they allow us to put constraints on the masses and eccentricities of the observed planets, or even to constrain the existence of…
We describe the digest2 software package, a fast, short-arc orbit classifier for small Solar System bodies. The digest2 algorithm has been serving the community for more than 13 years. The code provides a score, D2, which represents a…
In a transiting planetary system, the presence of a second planet will cause the time interval between transits to vary. These transit timing variations (TTV) are particularly large near mean-motion resonances and can be used to infer the…
When observing the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets using high-resolution spectroscopy, one aims to detect well-resolved spectral features with high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) as is possible today with modern spectrographs. However,…
The extended Kepler mission (K2) has revealed more than 500 transiting planets in roughly 500,000 stellar light curves. All of these were found either with the box least-squares algorithm or by visual inspection. Here we use our new transit…
We propose a method to distinguish between planetary and stellar companions to stars which present a periodic decrease in brightness, interpreted as a transit. Light curves from a total of 177 stars from the OGLE project were fitted by the…
It has been previously shown that moons of extrasolar planets may be detectable with the Kepler Mission, for moon masses above ~0.2 Earth masses Kipping et al. 2009c. Transit timing effects have been formerly identified as a potent tool to…
Transmission spectroscopy of Earth-like exoplanets is a potential tool for habitability screening. Transiting planets are present-day "Rosetta Stones" for understanding extrasolar planets because they offer the possibility to characterize…
Stellar activity limits the radial velocity search and characterisation of exoplanets, as it introduces spurious jitter in the data sets and prevents the correct retrieval of a planetary signal. This is key for M dwarfs, considering that…
Open clusters potentially provide an ideal environment for the search for transiting extrasolar planets since they feature a relatively large number of stars of the same known age and metallicity at the same distance. With this motivation,…
Tidal interactions are one of the primary drivers of orbital evolution for massive planets with short orbital periods. Tidal dissipation within host stars can cause the orbits of such planets to decay. However, the mechanisms of tidal…
The idea of finding extrasolar planets (ESPs) through observations of drops in stellar brightness due to transiting objects has been around for decades. It has only been in the last ten years, however, that any serious attempts to find ESPs…
One possibility for detecting low-amplitude pulsational variations is through gravitational microlensing. During a microlensing event, the temporary brightness increase leads to improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio, and thereby better…
PLATO 2.0 has recently been selected for ESA's M3 launch opportunity (2022/24). Providing accurate key planet parameters (radius, mass, density and age) in statistical numbers, it addresses fundamental questions such as: How do planetary…
(abridged) A method for simulating light curves containing stellar micro-variability for a range of spectral types and ages, based on parameter-by-parameter scaling of a multi-component fit to the solar irradiance power spectrum (from…
The CoRoT mission during its flight-phase 2007-2012 delivered the light-curves for over 2000 eclipsing binaries. Data from the Kepler mission have proven the existence of several transiting circumbinary planets. Albeit light-curves from…
A unique analytical solution of planet and star parameters can be derived from an extrasolar planet transit light curve under a number of assumptions. This analytical solution can be used to choose the best planet transit candidates for…