Related papers: Planet Occurrence from Doppler and transit surveys…
The discovery of over 200 extrasolar planets with the radial velocity (RV) technique has revealed that many giant planets have large eccentricities, in striking contrast with most of the planets in the solar system and prior theories of…
The Kepler Mission was launched on March 6, 2009 to perform a photometric survey of more than 100,000 dwarf stars to search for terrestrial-size planets with the transit technique. Follow-up observations of planetary candidates identified…
Star clusters provide an excellent opportunity to study the role of environment on determining the frequencies of short period planets. They provide a large sample of stars which can be imaged simultaneously, with a common distance, age and…
Ranked near the top of the long list of exciting discoveries made with NASA's Kepler photometer is the detection of transiting circumbinary planets. In just over a year the number of such planets went from zero to seven, including a…
We present an improved estimate of the occurrence rate of small planets orbiting small stars by searching the full four-year Kepler data set for transiting planets using our own planet detection pipeline and conducting transit injection and…
Of the approximately 350 extrasolar planets currently known, of order 10% orbit evolved stars with radii R >~ 2.5 R_sun. These planets are of particular interest because they tend to orbit more massive hosts, and have been subjected to…
The questions of how planets form and how common Earth-like planets are can be addressed by measuring the distribution of exoplanet masses and orbital periods. We report the occurrence rate of close-in planets (with orbital periods less…
Since the discovery of a planet transiting its host star in the year 2000, thousands of additional exoplanets and exoplanet candidates have been detected, mostly by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Some of them are almost as small as the…
The first transiting extrasolar planet, orbiting HD209458, was a Doppler wobble planet before its transits were discovered with a 10 cm CCD camera. Wide-angle CCD cameras, by monitoring in parallel the light curves of tens of thousands of…
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…
Are there other planetary systems in our Universe? Indirect evidence has been found for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy: the gravity of orbiting planets makes the star wobble, and the resulting periodic Doppler shifts have been…
We investigated the underlying architecture of planetary systems by deriving the distribution of planet multiplicity (number of planets) and the distribution of orbital inclinations based on the sample of planet candidates discovered by the…
Most Sun-like stars in the Galaxy reside in gravitationally-bound pairs of stars called "binary stars". While long anticipated, the existence of a "circumbinary planet" orbiting such a pair of normal stars was not definitively established…
Astronomers have discovered that both planets and binaries are abundant throughout the Galaxy. In combination, we know of over 100 planets in binary and higher-order multi-star systems, in both circumbinary and circumstellar configurations.…
The Solar System includes two planets --- Mercury and Mars --- significantly less massive than Earth, and all evidence indicates that planets of similar size orbit many stars. In fact, one of the first exoplanets to be discovered is a…
Binary stars are ubiquitous; the majority of solar-type stars exist in binaries. Exoplanet occurrence rate is suppressed in binaries, but some multiples do still host planets. Binaries cause observational biases in planet parameters, with…
Probing the connection between a star's metallicity and the presence and properties of any associated planets offers an observational link between conditions during the epoch of planet formation and mature planetary systems. We explore this…
The vast majority of known extrasolar planets orbit stars with a narrow range of masses (0.7-1.3 M_sun). Recent years have seen rapid growth in our knowledge about the properties of planetary systems with host stars significantly more…
Most of our knowledge of planets orbiting nearby stars comes from Doppler surveys. For spaced-based, high-contrast imaging missions, nearby stars with Doppler-discovered planets are attractive targets. The known orbits tell imaging missions…
The search for planets orbiting other stars has recently expanded to include stars from galaxies outside the Milky Way. With the TESS and Gaia surveys, photometric and kinematic information can be combined to identify transiting planet…