Related papers: Correcting Exoplanet Transmission Spectra for Stel…
New observational facilities are beginning to enable insights into the three-dimensional (3D) nature of exoplanets. Transmission spectroscopy is the most widely used method for characterizing transiting temperate exoplanet's atmospheres,…
Astrometry measures shifts in a star's photocentre and can be used to detect reflex motion due to orbiting exoplanets. Brightness asymmetries (e.g. starspots) rotating in and out of view can also cause apparent motion of the photocenter,…
The ultra-precise photometric space satellite MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) will provide the first opportunity to measure the albedos and scattered light curves from known short-period extrasolar planets. Due to the…
Most models used to predict or fit exoplanet transmission spectra do not include all the effects of atmospheric refraction. Namely, the angular size of the star with respect to the planet can limit the lowest altitude, or highest density…
Planets emit thermal radiation and reflect incident light that they recieve from their host stars. As a planet orbits it's host star the photometric variations associated with these two effects produce very similar phase curves. If observed…
Rocky exoplanets are faint and difficult to observe due to their small size and low brightness compared to their host star. Despite this, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has allowed us new methods and opportunities to study them.…
Astrometry is less sensitive to stellar activity than the radial velocity technique when attempting to detect Earth mass planets in the habitable zone of solar-type stars. This is due to a smaller number of physical processes affecting the…
Data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has produced of order one million light curves at cadences of 120 s and especially 1800 s for every ~27-day observing sector during its two-year nominal mission. These data…
We typically measure the radii of transiting exoplanets from the transit depth, which is given by the ratio of cross-sectional areas of the planet and star. However, if a star has dark starspots (or bright regions) distributed throughout…
One may consider cross-correlation routines applied to stellar spectra as a way to determine not only the radial velocities but also to assess the properties of stellar atmospheres. We show that this is not the case. High value of the…
Identifying and removing binary stars from stellar samples is a crucial but complicated task. Regardless of how carefully a sample is selected, some binaries will remain and complicate interpretation of results, especially via flux…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is conducting a two-year wide-field survey searching for transiting exoplanets around nearby bright stars that will be ideal for follow-up characterization. To facilitate studies of planet…
Detecting and characterising exoplanet atmospheres remains challenging because atmospheric signals can be comparable to residual noise and instrumental/astrophysical systematics. Spectral features span from a few ppm for small planets up to…
Stellar activity is a potential important limitation to the detection of low mass extrasolar planets with indirect methods (RV, photometry, astrometry). In previous papers, using the Sun as a proxy, we investigated the impact of stellar…
Transmission spectroscopy is the most widely used technique for studying exoplanet atmospheres. Since the planetary nightside faces the observer during a transit, highly irradiated giant exoplanets with warm nightsides emit thermal…
The star tracker is generally affected by the atmospheric background light and the aerodynamic environment when working in near space, which results in missing stars or false stars. Moreover, high-speed maneuvering may cause star trailing,…
The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope has provided an abundance of exoplanet spectra over the years. These spectra have enabled analysis studies using atmospheric retrievals to constrain the properties of…
To increase the sample size of future atmospheric characterization efforts, we build on the planetary infrared excess (PIE) technique that has been proposed as a means to detect and characterize the thermal spectra of transiting and…
Chance-aligned sources or blended companions can cause false positives in planetary transit detections or simply bias the determination of the candidate properties. In the era of high-precision space-based photometers, the need for…
Radio emission has been detected in a broad variety of stellar objects from all stages of stellar evolution. However, most of our knowledge originates from targeted observations of small samples, which are strongly biased to sources which…