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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…
Currently, over forty transiting planets have been discovered by ground-based photometric surveys, and space-based missions like Kepler and CoRoT are expected to detect hundreds more. Follow-up photometric observations from the ground will…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is focusing on relatively bright stars and has found thousands of planet candidates. However, mainly because of the low spatial resolution of its cameras ($\approx$ 21 arcsec/pixel), TESS is…
We investigate the possiblity to detect Earth-like planets, in the visible and the near infrared domains, with ground based Extremely Large Telescopes equipped with adaptive systems capable of providing high Strehl ratios. From a detailed…
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 preparation of science objectives of the ESA's PLATO space mission will require the implementation of hare-and-hound exercises relying on the massive generation of representative simulated light-curves. We developed a light-curve…
The increasing number of transiting exoplanets sparked a significant interest in discovering their moons. Most of the methods in the literature utilize timing analysis of the raw light curves. Here we propose a new approach for the direct…
Stellar activity features such as spots can create complications in determining planetary parameters through spectroscopic and photometric observations. The overlap of a transiting planet and a stellar spot, for instance, can produce…
The solar brightness varies on timescales from minutes to decades. Determining the sources of such variations, often referred to as solar noise, is of importance for multiple reasons: a) it is the background that limits the detection of…
In a transiting planetary system, the presence of a second planet will cause the time interval between transits to vary. These transit timing variations (TTV) are particularly large near mean-motion resonances and can be used to infer the…
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…
Digital co-addition of astronomical images is a common technique for increasing signal-to-noise and image depth. A modification of this simple technique has been applied to the detection of minor bodies in the Solar System: first stationary…
Since the discovery of short-period exoplanets a decade ago, photometric surveys have been recognized as a feasible method to detect transiting hot Jupiters. Many transit surveys are now under way, with instruments ranging from 10-cm…
The detection of planetary transits in stellar photometric light-curves is poised to become the main method for finding substantial numbers of terrestrial planets. The French-European mission COROT (foreseen for launch in 2005) will perform…
We investigate the effect of planetary rotation on the transit spectrum of an extrasolar giant planet. During ingress and egress, absorption features arising from the planet's atmosphere are Doppler shifted by of order the planet's…
Measuring the stellar rotation of one of the components in eclipsing binaries (EBs) or planetary systems is a challenging task. The difficulty is mainly due to the complexity of analyzing, in the same light curve, the signal from the…
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…
The PHOT (Portable High-Speed Occultation Telescope) systems were developed for the specific purpose of observing stellar occultations by solar system objects. Stellar occultations have unique observing constraints: they may only be…
This work aims at determining the impact of slow to moderate rotation on the regular patterns often present in solar-like oscillation spectra. We focus on the well-known asteroseismic diagnostic echelle diagrams, examining how rotation may…
Transit timing variations (TTVs) can provide useful information for systems observed by transit, as they allow us to put constraints on the masses and eccentricities of the observed planets, or even to constrain the existence of…