Related papers: The PLATO Multiple Star Working Group (MSWG)
A feasibility study was carried out at the Astronomical Observatory of the Autonomous Region of the Aosta Valley demonstrating that it is a well-poised site to conduct an upcoming observing campaign aimed at detecting small-size…
We describe a project (transitsearch.org) currently attempting to discover transiting intermediate-period planets orbiting bright parent stars, and we simulate that project's performance. The discovery of such a transit would be an…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
By the 2040s, the exoplanet field will have moved from the discovery of a few thousand planets to hundreds of thousands, thanks to Gaia DR5, TESS, PLATO, Roman, and their successors. At that stage, the key bottleneck will no longer be…
In a few years the Kepler and TESS missions will provide ultra-precise photometry for thousands of RR Lyrae and hundreds of Cepheid stars. In the extended Kepler mission all targets are proposed in the Guest Observer (GO) Program, while the…
The WFIRST microlensing mission will measure precise light curves and relative parallaxes for millions of stars, giving it the potential to characterize short-period transiting planets all along the line of sight and into the galactic…
Due to their small radii, M-dwarfs are very promising targets to search for transiting super-Earths, with a planet of 2 Earth radii orbiting an M5 dwarf in the habitable zone giving rise to a 0.5% photometric signal, with a period of two…
Most future surveys designed to discover transiting exoplanets, including TESS and PLATO, will target bright (V<13) and nearby solar-type stars having a spectral type later than F5. In order to enhance the probability of identifying…
The first two LIGO and Virgo observation runs have been important milestones in the gravitational wave (GW) field, thanks to the detection of GW signals from ten binary black hole systems and a binary neutron star system. In order to fully…
The primary difficulty with using transits to discover extrasolar planets is the low probability a planet has of transiting its parent star. One way of overcoming this difficulty is to search for transits in dense stellar fields, such as…
This white paper presents an analysis of Astro2020 science priorities and NASA's future astrophysics mission architecture, advocating for a coordinated fleet of \$1--2B missions, smaller than typical Flagship observatories, but…
Although the final observations of the Spitzer Warm Mission are currently scheduled for March 2019, it can continue operations through the end of the decade with no loss of photometric precision. As we will show, there is a strong science…
Direct imaging surveys for exoplanets commonly exclude binary stars from their target lists, leaving a large part of the overall planet demography unexplored. To address this gap in our understanding of planet formation and evolution, we…
The Pandora SmallSat is a NASA flight project aimed at studying the atmospheres of exoplanets -- planets orbiting stars outside our Solar System. Pandora will provide the first dataset of simultaneous, multiband (visible and NIR),…
The BRIght Target Explorer (BRITE) Constellation is the first nanosatellite mission applied to astrophysical research. Five satellites in low-Earth orbits perform precise optical two-colour photometry of the brightest stars in the night…
Microlensing can access planet populations that no other method can probe: cold wide-orbit planets beyond the snow line, planets in both the Galactic bulge and disk, and free floating planets (FFPs). The demographics of each population will…
The Wide Field Camera Transit Survey is a pioneer program aimed to search for extra-solar planets in the near-infrared. The standard data reduction pipeline of the program uses aperture photometry to construct the light curves. We…
The ESA space mission Euclid was launched on July 1st, 2023 and is undergoing its science verification phase. In this invited review we show that Euclid means a before and an after for our understanding of ultra-cool dwarfs and…
Stellar variability impacts radial velocities at various timescales and therefore the detectability of exoplanets and the mass determination based on this technique. It is necessary to implement systematic studies, to delineate the current…
We describe the current plans for a spectroscopic survey of millions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy using the Guo Shou Jing Telescope (GSJT, formerly the Large Area Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope - LAMOST). The survey will obtain…