Related papers: Assessing the residual biases in high-resolution t…
It has long been understood that the light curve of a transiting planet constrains the density of its host star. That fact is routinely used to improve measurements of the stellar surface gravity and has been argued to be an independent…
The atmospheric composition of transiting exoplanets can be characterized during transit by spectroscopy. For the transit of an Earth twin, models predict that biogenic $O_2$ and $O_3$ should be detectable, as well as water vapour, a…
This tutorial is an introduction to techniques used to characterize the atmospheres of transiting exoplanets. We intend it to be a useful guide for the undergraduate, graduate student, or postdoctoral scholar who wants to begin research in…
From simulations of transit observations, it is found that the detectability of extrasolar planets depends only on two parameters: The signal-to-noise ratio during a transit, and the number of data points observed during transits. All other…
Spectroscopic transit detection of constituents in winds from "evaporating" planets on close-in transiting orbits could provide desperately needed information on the composition, formation, and orbital evolution of such objects. We obtained…
The transit technique is responsible for the majority of exoplanet discoveries to date. Characterizing these planets involves careful modeling of their transit profiles. A common technique involves expressing the transit duration using a…
It has been shown that spectroscopy of transiting extrasolar planets can potentially provide a wealth of information about their atmospheres. Herein, we set up the inverse problem in spectroscopic retrieval. We use non-linear optimal…
Transmission spectroscopy serves as a valuable tool for probing atmospheric absorption features in the terminator regions of exoplanets. Stellar surface heterogeneity can introduce wavelength-dependent contamination that complicates the…
Motivated by the recognition that variation in the optical transmission of the atmosphere is probably the main limitation to the precision of ground-based CCD measurements of celestial fluxes, we review the physical processes that attenuate…
We investigate the rate of false planetary transit detection due to blending with eclipsing binaries. Our approach is purely empirical and is based on the analysis of the artificially blended light curves of the eclipsing binary stars in…
We model the impact of non-uniform cloud cover on transit transmission spectra. Patchy clouds exist in nearly every solar system atmosphere, brown dwarfs, and transiting exoplanets. Our major findings suggest that fractional cloud coverage…
The distribution of a pure condensible planetary atmosphere in equilibrium with a surface reservoir is revisited employing the energy budget of the climate system, emphasizing the atmospheric horizontal latent heat transport. This…
The paper addresses the single-file diffusion in the presence of an absorbing boundary. The emphasis is on an interplay between the hard-core interparticle interaction and the absorption process. The resulting dynamics exhibits several…
Discoveries of terrestrial, Earth-sized exoplanets that lie within the habitable zone (HZ) of their host stars continue to occur at increasing rates. Transit spectroscopy can potentially enable the detection of molecular signatures from…
Time-varying inhomogeneities on stellar surfaces constitute one of the largest sources of radial velocity (RV) error for planet detection and characterization. We show that stellar variations, because they manifest on coherent, rotating…
Most planets currently amenable to transit spectroscopy are close enough to their host star to exhibit a relatively strong day to night temperature gradient. For hot planets, this leads to cause a chemical composition dichotomy between the…
The Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) technique provides a powerful tool to detect additional planets in transiting exoplanetary systems. In this paper we show how transiting planets with significant TTVs can be systematically missed, or…
This thesis focuses on the detection of extrasolar planets via the transit method, and more specifically addresses issues relevant to the preparation of upcoming space missions such as CoRoT, Kepler, Eddington, aiming to detect terrestrial…
For the time being, Earth remains the best and only example of a habitable (and inhabited) world. Therefore, it is important to explore and understand the full range of spectral signatures and variability of Earth in order to inform the…
Context. The atmospheric absorption of the Earth is an important limiting factor for ground-based spectroscopic observations and the near-infrared and infrared regions are the most affected. Several software packages that produce a…