Related papers: Stellar pulsations interfering with the transit li…
Planets embedded within debris disks gravitationally perturb nearby dust and can create clumpy, azimuthally asymmetric circumstellar ring structures that rotate in lock with the planet. The Earth creates one such structure in the solar…
Gravity darkening induced by rapid stellar rotation provides us with a unique opportunity to characterize the spin-orbit misalignment of a planetary system through analysis of its photometric transit. We use the gravity-darkened transit…
The weak orbital-phase dependent reflection signal of an exoplanet contains information on the planet surface, such as the distribution of continents and oceans on terrestrial planets. This light curve is usually studied in the time domain,…
The presence of silicate material in known rings in the Solar System raises the possibility of ring systems existing even within the snow line -- where most transiting exoplanets are found. Previous studies have shown that the detection of…
Gravitational waves provide a novel way to probe axions or axion-like particles coupled to a dark photon field, even in the absence of couplings to Standard Model particles. In the conventional misalignment mechanism, the generation of an…
Light curve modulations in the sample of Kepler planet candidates allows the disentangling of the nature of the transiting object by photometrically measuring its mass. This is possible by detecting the effects of the gravitational pull of…
Although transit spectroscopy is a powerful method for studying the composition, thermal properties and dynamics of exoplanet atmospheres, only a few transiting terrestrial exoplanets will be close enough to allow significant transit…
Variations in stellar flux can potentially overwhelm the photometric signal of a transiting planet. Such variability has not previously been well-characterized in the ultraviolet lines used to probe the inflated atmospheres surrounding hot…
As a planet orbits, it causes periodic modulations in the light curve of its host star. Due to the combined effects of the planet raising tides on the host star, relativistic beaming of the starlight, and reflection of light off the…
We calculate eclipsing light curves for accretion flows around a rotating black hole taking into account the atmospheric effects of the companion star. In the cases of no atmospheric effects, the light curves contain the information of the…
This thesis investigates in the time domain a particular class of second order perturbations of a perfect fluid non-rotating compact star: those arising from the coupling between first order radial and non-radial perturbations. This problem…
A coherently oscillating ultra-light axion can behave as dark matter. In particular, its coherently oscillating pressure perturbations can source an oscillating scalar metric perturbation, with a characteristic oscillation frequency which…
Radial pulsations of neutron stars and strange quark stars with nuclear crust are studied. The avoided crossing phenomenon occurring for the radial modes is found and discussed. Neutron star models are constructed using a realistic equation…
As a planet transits the face of a star, it accelerates along the line-of-sight. The changing delay in the propagation of photons produces an apparent deceleration of the planet across the sky throughout the transit. This persistent…
Time-series photometry and spectroscopy of transiting exoplanets allow us to study their atmospheres. Unfortunately, the required precision to extract atmospheric information surpasses the design specifications of most general purpose…
The measurement of the spin frequency in accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars (AMXPs) is strongly affected by the presence of an unmodeled component in the pulse arrival times called 'timing noise'. We show that it is possible to attribute…
The stable oscillations of pulsating stars can serve as accurate timepieces, which may be monitored for the influence of exoplanets. An external companion gravitationally tugs the host star, causing periodic changes in pulsation arrival…
A leap forward has been performed due to the space-borne missions, MOST, CoRoT and Kepler. They provided a wealth of observational data, and more precisely oscillation spectra, which have been (and are still) exploited to infer the internal…
Lightcurves have long been used to study stellar activity and have more recently become a major tool in the field of exoplanet research. We discuss the various ways in which stellar activity can influence transit lightcurves, and study the…
We demonstrate that fitted values of stellar radius obtained by fitting theoretical light curves to observations of millisecond period X-ray pulsars can significantly depend on the method used to calculate the light curves. The worst-case…