Related papers: Detecting Secular Perturbations in Kepler Planetar…
Among other things, studies of the formation and evolution of planetary systems currently draw on two important observational resources: the precise characterization available for planets that transit their parent stars and the frequency…
We present a new method to assess the properties of transiting planet candidates by multicolor photometry. By analyzing multicolor transit/eclipse light curves and apparent magnitudes of the target in parallel, this method attempts to…
Observations of extrasolar planets using Integral Field Spectroscopy (IFS), if coupled with an extreme Adaptive Optics system and analyzed with a Simultaneous Differential Imaging technique (SDI), are a powerful tool to detect and…
The Kepler DR25 planet candidate catalog was produced using an automated method of planet candidate identification based on various tests. These tests were tuned to obtain a reasonable but arbitrary balance between catalog completeness and…
The detection of periodic signals from transiting exoplanets is often impeded by extraneous aperiodic photometric variability, either intrinsic to the star or arising from the measurement process. Frequently, these variations are…
We study the nonlinear observability of a systems states in view of how well they are observable and what control inputs would improve the convergence of their estimates. We use these insights to develop an observability-aware…
We develop a general method to fit the planetary distribution function (PLDF) to exoplanet survey data. This maximum likelihood method accommodates more than one planet per star and any number of planet or target star properties.…
We present new ways to identify single and multiple moons around extrasolar planets using planetary transit timing variations (TTVs) and transit duration variations (TDVs). For planets with one moon, measurements from successive transits…
There are two popular ways to speed up simulations of planet formation via increasing the collision probability: ({\it i}) confine motion to 2D, ({\it ii}) artificially enhance the physical radii of the bodies by an expansion factor. In…
A planet's orbital orientation relative to an observer's line of sight determines the chord length for a transiting planet, i.e., the projected distance a transiting planet travels across the stellar disc. For a given circular orbit, the…
We propose several descriptive measures to characterize the arrangements of planetary masses, periods, and mutual inclinations within exoplanetary systems. These measures are based in complexity theory and capture the global, system-level…
Transit search programs such as CoRoT and Kepler now have the capability of detecting planets as small as the Earth. The detection of these planets however requires the removal of all false positives. Although many false positives can be…
Short-period super-Earths and mini-Neptunes encircle more than $\sim50\%$ of Sun-like stars and are relatively amenable to direct observational characterization. Despite this, environments in which these planets accrete are difficult to…
In this study we identify 11 Kepler systems (KIC 5255552, 5653126, 5731312, 7670617, 7821010, 8023317, 10268809, 10296163, 11519226, 11558882 and 12356914) with a "flip-flop" effect in the eclipse timing variations O-C diagrams of the…
Astrophysical data, in the domains of time, involve a wide range of stellar variability phenomena, among them the magnetic activity of the order of a few hours until the signature of an extra-solar planet which can cover a scale of time of…
Gravitational interactions between planets in transiting exoplanetary systems lead to variations in the times of transit that are diagnostic of the planetary masses and the dynamical state of the system. Here we show that synodic "chopping"…
Theories of stellar convective core overshoot can be examined through analysis of pulsating stars. Better accuracy can be achieved by obtaining external constraints such as those provided by observing pulsating stars in eclipsing binary…
A Bayesian re-analysis of published radial velocity data sets is providing evidence for additional planetary candidates. The nonlinear model fitting is accomplished with a new hybrid Markov chain Monte Carlo (HMCMC) algorithm which…
We present a self-consistent model for the tidal evolution of circumbinary planets. Based on the weak-friction model, we derive expressions of the resulting forces and torques considering complete tidal interactions between all the bodies…
We present results of a study on identifying circumbinary planet candidates that produce multiple transits during one conjunction with eclipsing binary systems. The occurrence of these transits enables us to estimate the candidates' orbital…