Related papers: A General-Purpose Transit Simulator for Arbitrary …
A transiting extrasolar planet sequentially blocks off the light coming from the different parts of the disk of the host star in a time dependent manner. Due to the spin of the star, this produces an asymmetric distortion in the line…
A planetary transit produces both a photometric signal and a spectroscopic signal. Precise observations of the transit light curve reveal the planetary radius and allow a search for timing anomalies caused by satellites or additional…
Very high quality light curves are now available for thousands of detached eclipsing binary stars and transiting exoplanet systems as a result of surveys for transiting exoplanets and other large-scale photometric surveys. I have developed…
Astronomical transients are stellar objects that become temporarily brighter on various timescales and have led to some of the most significant discoveries in cosmology and astronomy. Some of these transients are the explosive deaths of…
We have developed a new model for analysing light curves of planetary transits when there are starspots on the stellar disc. Because the parameter space contains a profusion of local minima we developed a new optimisation algorithm which…
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 present a web-based application designed to simulate rotational light curves of small airless Solar System bodies under user-defined geometrical and physical conditions. The tool integrates both physical and empirical photometric models…
Recently, a generalization of the standard optical multiport was proposed [Phys. Rev. A 93, 043845 (2016)]. These directionally unbiased multiports allow photons to reverse direction and exit backwards from the input port, providing a…
Research in extrasolar-planet science is data-driven. With the advent of radial-velocity instruments like HARPS and HARPS-N, and transit space missions like Kepler, our ability to discover and characterise extrasolar planets is no longer…
The observed light curves of most eclipsing binaries and stars with transiting planets can be well described and interpreted by current advanced physical models which also allow for the determination of many physical parameters of eclipsing…
Differential spectroscopy during exoplanet transits permits to reconstruct spectra of small stellar surface portions that successively become hidden behind the planet. The center-to-limb behavior of stellar line shapes, asymmetries and…
Transits of habitable planets around solar-like stars are expected to be shallow, and to have long periods, which means low information content. The current bottleneck in the detection of such transits is caused in large part by the…
Context. We present a model-free method for mapping surface brightness variations. Aims. We aim to develop a method that is not dependent on either stellar atmosphere models or limb-darkening equation. This method is optimized for exoplanet…
We derive analytic, closed form, numerically stable solutions for the total flux received from a spherical planet, moon or star during an occultation if the specific intensity map of the body is expressed as a sum of spherical harmonics.…
We present scope (Simulated CCD Observations for Photometric Experimentation), a Python package to create a forward model of telescope detectors and simulate stellar targets with motion relative to the CCD. The primary application of this…
Individual stars located near the caustics of galaxy clusters can undergo extreme magnification when crossing micro-caustics, rendering them observable even at cosmological distances. Though most massive stars are likely reside in binary…
Astrophysical light curves are particularly challenging data objects due to the intensity and variety of noise contaminating them. Yet, despite the astronomical volumes of light curves available, the majority of algorithms used to process…
Rings around exoplanets (exorings) are one of the most expected discoveries in exoplanetary research. There is an increasing number of theoretical and observational efforts for detecting exorings, but none of them have succeeded yet. Most…
This paper describes the VARTOOLS program, which is an open-source command-line utility, written in C, for analyzing astronomical time-series data, especially light curves. The program provides a general-purpose set of tools for processing…
Gravitational lensing refers to the deflection of light by the gravity of celestial bodies, often predominantly composed of dark matter. Seen through a gravitational lens, the images of distant galaxies appear distorted. In this paper we…