Related papers: Detecting and sizing the Earth with PLATO: A feasi…

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will photometrically monitor approximately 1 billion stars for ten years. The resulting light curves can be used to detect transiting exoplanets. In particular, as demonstrated by Lund et al.…

To understand the frequency, and thus the formation and evolution, of planetary systems like our own solar system, it is critical to detect Jupiter-like planets in Jupiter-like orbits. For long-term radial-velocity monitoring, it is useful…

Context. The CoRoT short runs give us the opportunity to observe a large variety of late-type stars through their solar-like oscillations. We report observations of the star HD175726 that lasted for 27 days during the first short run of the…

I report the results from a study of the transit times for CoRoT-1b, which was one of the first planets discovered by CoRoT. Analysis of the pipeline reduced CoRoT light curve yields a new determination of the physical and orbital…

Stellar surface heterogeneities, such as spots and faculae, often contaminate exoplanet transit spectra, hindering precise atmospheric characterization. We demonstrate a novel, epoch-based, model-independent method to mitigate stellar…

Our aim in this paper is to refine the orbital and physical parameters of the HATS-2 planetary system and study transit timing variations and atmospheric composition thanks to transit observations that span more than ten years and that were…

Stellar photometric variability and instrumental effects, like cosmic ray hits, data discontinuities, data leaks, instrument aging etc. cause difficulties in the characterization of exoplanets and have an impact on the accuracy and…

We present the Young Exoplanet Transit Initiative (YETI), in which we use several 0.2 to 2.6m telescopes around the world to monitor continuously young (< 100 Myr), nearby (< 1 kpc) stellar clusters mainly to detect young transiting planets…

Terrestrial planets in the habitable zone around nearby stars are of great interest and provide a good sample for further characteristics of their habitability. In this paper, we collect a nearby star catalog within 20 pc according to the…

We present a study on the determination of rotation periods (P) of solar-like stars from the photometric irregular time-sampling of the ESA Gaia mission, currently scheduled for launch in 2013, taking into account its dependence on ecliptic…

Aims. We used realistic three-dimensional (3D) radiative hydrodynamical (RHD) simulations from the Stagger-grid and synthetic images computed with the radiative transfer code Optim3D to provide interferometric observables to extract the…

The ESA PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission is designed to detect terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of solar-type stars. Owing to telemetry constraints, the selection of PLATO targets must be performed in…

Upcoming NASA astrophysics missions such as the James Webb Space Telescope will search for signs of life on planets transiting nearby stars. Doing so will require co-adding dozens of transmission spectra to build up sufficient signal to…

The detection of exoplanets using any method is prone to confusion due to the intrinsic variability of the host star. We investigate the effect of cool starspots on the detectability of the exoplanets around solar-like stars using the…

The photospheric spot activity of some of the stars with transiting planets discovered by the CoRoT space experiment is reviewed. Their out-of-transit light modulations are fitted by a spot model previously tested with the total solar…

The detrending algorithms which are widely used to reduce the impact of stellar variability on space-based transit surveys are ill-suited for estimating the parameters of confirmed planets, as they unavoidably alter the transit signal. We…

In the last years, the Observatory of Padova (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica - Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova) and the University of Padova have been involved massively in projects dedicated to the exoplanets search, both ground, and…

The XO project aims at detecting transiting exoplanets around bright stars from the ground using small telescopes. The original configuration of XO (McCullough et al. 2005) has been changed and extended as described here. The instrumental…

The present work deals with the detection of phase changes in an exoplanetary system. HD 46375 is a solar analog known to host a non-transiting Saturn-mass exoplanet with a 3.0236 day period. It was observed by the CoRoT satellite for 34…

Small planets are extremely common in the Galaxy, including planets with masses and radii between those of Earth and Neptune. Characterizing these planets' masses requires ultra-precise radial velocities. The ESPRESSO spectrograph was…