Related papers: Assessing the residual biases in high-resolution t…
Wide-field surveys for transiting planets, such as the NASA Kepler and TESS missions, are usually conducted without knowing which stars have binary companions. Unresolved and unrecognized binaries give rise to systematic errors in planet…
(Abridged) The existence of an extended neutral hydrogen exosphere around small planets can be used as an evidence for the presence of water in their lower atmosphere but, to date, such feature has not been securely detected in rocky…
Transmission spectroscopy during planetary transits is expected to be a major source of information on the atmospheres of small (approximately Earth-sized) exoplanets in the next two decades. This technique, however, is intrinsically…
When observing the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets using high-resolution spectroscopy, one aims to detect well-resolved spectral features with high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) as is possible today with modern spectrographs. However,…
Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while…
I present an initial investigation into a new planet detection technique that uses the transit timing of a known, transiting planet. The transits of a solitary planet orbiting a star occur at equally spaced intervals in time. If a second…
Since the discovery of the first exoplanets more than 20 years ago, there has been an increasing need for photometric and spectroscopic models to characterize these systems. While imaging has been used extensively for Solar System bodies…
The detection of extrasolar planets' atmospheres requires very demanding observations. For planets that can not be spatially separated from their host stars, i.e. the vast majority of planets, the transiting planets are the only ones…
The observable spectrum of an unresolved binary star system is a superposition of two single-star spectra. Even without a detectable velocity offset between the two stellar components, the combined spectrum of a binary system is in general…
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…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
The physical characteristics and atmospheric chemical composition of newly discovered exoplanets are often inferred from their transit spectra which are obtained from complex numerical models of radiative transfer. Alternatively, simple…
Photometric observations of planetary transits may show localized bumps, called transit anomalies, due to the possible crossing of photospheric starspots. The aim of this work is to analyze the transit anomalies and derive the temperature…
Refraction deflects photons that pass through atmospheres, which affects transit light curves. Refraction thus provides an avenue to probe physical properties of exoplanet atmospheres and to constrain the presence of clouds and hazes. In…
We propose a new method for investigating atmospheric inhomogeneities in exoplanets through transmission spectroscopy. Our approach links chromatic variations in conventional transit model parameters (central transit time, total and full…
Matrix inversion problems are often encountered in experimental physics, and in particular in high-energy particle physics, under the name of unfolding. The true spectrum of a physical quantity is deformed by the presence of a detector,…
Transit timing variations - deviations from strict periodicity between successive passages of a transiting planet - can be used to probe the structure and dynamics of multiple-planet systems. In this paper, we examine prospects for…
We present a method that employs the secondary eclipse light curves of transiting extrasolar planets to probe the spatial variation of their thermal emission. This technique permits an observer to resolve the surface of the planet without…
We present a spectrogram separation method tailored for mixtures comprising two nonstationary components. By exploiting the unique characteristics of their time-frequency representations, we propose an inverse problem formulation to…
The non-uniform surface temperature distribution of rotating active stars is routinely mapped with the Doppler Imaging technique. Inhomogeneities in the surface produce features in high-resolution spectroscopic observations that shift in…