Related papers: An analytical theory for the resolution attainable…
[Abridged] Distant stars and planets will remain spatially unresolved for the foreseeable future. It is nonetheless possible to infer aspects of their brightness markings and viewing geometries by analyzing disk-integrated rotational and…
An exoplanet-exomoon system presents a superposition of phase curves to observers - the dominant component varies according to the planetary period, and the lesser varies according to both the planetary and the lunar period. If the spectra…
Understanding a planet's atmosphere is a necessary condition for understanding not only the planet itself, but also its formation, structure, evolution, and habitability, This puts a premium on obtaining spectra, and developing credible…
The leading difficulty in achieving the contrast necessary to directly image exoplanets and associated structures (eg. protoplanetary disks) at wavelengths ranging from the visible to the infrared are quasi-static speckles, and they are…
[Abridged] Recently, there have been a series of detections of molecules in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets using high spectral resolution (R~100,000) observations, mostly using the CRyogenic high-resolution InfraRed Echelle…
The classical picture of our Solar System being the archetypal outcome of planet formation has been rendered obsolete by the astonishing diversity of extrasolar-system architectures. From rare hot-Jupiters to abundant super-Earths and…
Research into light curves from stars (temporal variation of brightness) has completely changed how exoplanets are discovered or characterised. This study including star light curves from the Kepler dataset as a way to discover exoplanets…
We investigate the effect of observing cadence on the precision of radius ratio values obtained from transit light curves by performing uniform Markov Chain Monte Carlo fits of 46 exoplanets observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey…
The large number of new planets expected from wide-area transit surveys means that follow-up transmission spectroscopy studies of their atmospheres will be limited by the availability of telescope assets. We argue that telescopes covering a…
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…
Spectral retrieval has long been a powerful tool for interpreting planetary remote sensing observations. Flexible, parameterised, agnostic models are coupled with inversion algorithms in order to infer atmospheric properties directly from…
One of the main endeavors of the field of exoplanetary sciences is the characterization of exoplanet atmospheres on a population level. The current method of choice to accomplish this task is transmission spectroscopy, where the apparent…
Retrieval of exoplanetary atmospheric properties from their transmission spectra commonly assumes that the errors in the data are Gaussian and independent. However, non-Gaussian noise can occur due to instrumental or stellar systematics and…
We report new methods for evaluating realistic observing programs that search stars for planets by direct imaging, where observations are selected from an optimized star list, and where stars can be observed multiple times. We show how…
High contrast direct imaging of exoplanets can provide many important observables, including measurements of the orbit, spectra that probe the lower layers of the atmosphere, and phase variations of the planet, but cannot directly measure…
Eclipsing systems, such as transiting exoplanets, allow one to measure the mean stellar density of the host star under various idealized assumptions. Asterodensity Profiling (AP) compares this density to an independently determined value in…
We propose the application of coronagraphic techniques to the spectroscopic direct detection of exoplanets via the Doppler shift of planetary molecular lines. Even for an unresolved close-in planetary system, we show that the combination of…
We introduce EXOFIT, a Bayesian tool for estimating orbital parameters of extrasolar planets from radial velocity measurements. EXOFIT can search for either one or two planets at present. EXOFIT employs Markov Chain Monte Carlo method…
We analyze photometric observations of stars, which experienced microlensing events at the considered time, in order to compare the efficiency of detecting exoplanets in observations performed at thirteen different telescopes and with…
The EXtreme PREcision Spectrograph (EXPRES) is a new Doppler spectrograph designed to reach a radial velocity measurement precision sufficient to detect Earth-like exoplanets orbiting nearby, bright stars. We report on extensive laboratory…