Related papers: Advanced Modeling for Exoplanet Detection and Char…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
An exoplanet's optical phase curve constrains the thermal emission and albedo of the planet's surface and/or atmosphere, as well as potentially constraining the mass via gravitational influences on the host star. Recently, Jansen & Kipping…
Searching for transits provides a very promising technique for finding close-in extra-solar planets. Transiting planets present the advantage of allowing one to determine physical properties such as mass and radius unambiguously. The…
We have added to the Chroma+ suite of stellar atmosphere and spectrum modelling codes the ability to synthesize the exo-planet transit lightcurve for planets of arbitrary size up to 10% of the host stellar radius, and arbitrary planetary…
Previous studies showed evidence of a dearth of close-in exoplanets around fast rotators, which can be explained by the combined action of intense tidal and magnetic interactions between planets and their host star. Detecting more…
The microlensing technique has found 10 exoplanets to date and promises to discover more in the near future. While planetary transit light curves all show a familiar shape, planetary perturbations to microlensing light curves can manifest a…
The ultra-precise photometric space satellite MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) will provide the first opportunity to measure the albedos and scattered light curves from known short-period extrasolar planets. Due to the…
Light curves show the flux variation from the target star and its orbiting planets as a function of time. In addition to the transit features created by the planets, the flux also includes the reflected light component of each planet, which…
Photometric survey data from the Kepler mission have been used to discover and characterize thousands of transiting exoplanet and eclipsing binary (EB) systems. These discoveries have enabled empirical studies of occurrence rates which…
We used the 0.5-m robotic telescopes located at the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences for monitoring two square degrees of the sky with the aim of detecting new exoplanets. A dimming of the visible…
Refraction deflects photons that pass through atmospheres, which affects transit light curves. Refraction thus provides an avenue to probe physical properties of exoplanet atmospheres and to constrain the presence of clouds and hazes. In…
High contrast direct imaging of exoplanets can provide many important observables, including measurements of the orbit, spectra that probe the lower layers of the atmosphere, and phase variations of the planet, but cannot directly measure…
Microlensing offers a unique opportunity to probe exoplanets that are temperate and beyond the snow line, as small as Jovian satellites, at extragalactic distance, and even free floating exoplanets, regimes where the sensitivity of other…
The mutual orbital alignment in multiple planetary systems is an important parameter for understanding their formation. There are a number of elaborate techniques to determine the alignment parameters using photometric or spectroscopic…
The search for exoplanets is an active field in astronomy, with direct imaging as one of the most challenging methods due to faint exoplanet signals buried within stronger residual starlight. Successful detection requires advanced image…
In this paper we describe an algorithm and deduce the related mathematical formulae that allows the computation of observed fluxes in stellar and planetary systems with arbitrary number of bodies being part of a transit or occultation…
Exoplanetary atmospheric observations require an exquisite precision in the measurement of the relative flux among wavelengths. In this paper, we aim to provide a new adaptive method to treat light curves before fitting transit parameters…
Strong variations of any kind and causes within a stellar light curve may prohibit the detection of transits, particularly of faint or shallow transits caused by small planets passing in front of the stellar disk. The success of future…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will observe $\sim$150~million stars brighter than $T_{\rm mag} \approx 16$, with photometric precision from 60~ppm to 3~percent, enabling an array of exoplanet and stellar astrophysics…
Several processes can cause the shape of an extrasolar giant planet's shadow, as viewed in transit, to depart from circular. In addition to rotational effects, cloud formation, non-homogenous haze production and movement, and dynamical…