Related papers: exoatlas: friendly Python code for exoplanet popul…
This white paper advocates for the creation of a community-wide program to maintain precise mid-transit times of exoplanets that would likely be targeted by future platforms. Given the sheer number of targets that will require careful…
The discovery of thousands of exoplanets over the last couple of decades has shown that the birth of planets is a very efficient process in nature. Theories invoke a multitude of mechanisms to describe the assembly of planets in the disks…
What kind of environment may exist on terrestrial planets around other stars? In spite of the lack of direct observations, it may not be premature to speculate on exoplanetary climates, for instance to optimize future telescopic…
For modeling the spectra of exoplanets one must know their atmospheric composition. This is necessary because the abundance of molecules, atoms, ions and condensates is needed to construct the total cross-section for the interaction between…
We present the Exoplanet Simple Orbit Fitting Toolbox (ExoSOFT), a new, open-source suite to fit the orbital elements of planetary or stellar mass companions to any combination of radial velocity and astrometric data. To explore the…
It is difficult to study the interiors of terrestrial planets in the Solar System and the problem is magnified for distant exoplanets. However, sometimes nature is helpful. Some planetary bodies are torn to fragments and consumed by the…
Today, we know ~4330 exoplanets orbiting their host stars in ~3200 planetary systems. The diversity of these exoplanets is large, and none of the known exoplanets is a twin to any of the solar system planets, nor is any of the known…
The ancestor philosophers' dream of thousands of new worlds is finally realised: about 3500 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the neighborhood of our Sun. Most of them are very different from those we used to know in our Solar…
We present the scientific performance results of PynPoint, our Python-based software package that uses principle component analysis to detect and estimate the flux of exoplanets in two dimensional imaging data. Recent advances in adaptive…
In the near future there will be launched space missions (e.g. COROT, KEPLER), designed to detect Earth-like extrasolar planets. The orbital elements of these (still hypothetic) planets will contain some uncertainties, that can only be…
We are now on a clear trajectory for improvements in exoplanet observations that will revolutionize our ability to characterize their atmospheric structure, composition, and circulation, from gas giants to rocky planets. However, exoplanet…
The search for life has two goals essentially: looking for planets with Earth-like conditions (Earth similarity) and looking for the possibility of life in some form (habitability). Determining habitability from exoplanet data requires that…
We present the first stable release of Halotools (v0.2), a community-driven Python package designed to build and test models of the galaxy-halo connection. Halotools provides a modular platform for creating mock universes of galaxies…
The architecture of exoplanetary systems is often different from the solar system, with some exoplanets being in close orbits around their host stars and having orbital periods of only a few days. In analogy to interactions between stars in…
Exoplanet surveys have revealed a wide diversity of planetary systems, requiring integrated models of planet formation to explain their origin. Planet population synthesis (PPS) modelling is a key tool for linking theory with the…
The Kepler Mission has discovered thousands of exoplanets and revolutionized our understanding of their population. This large, homogeneous catalog of discoveries has enabled rigorous studies of the occurrence rate of exoplanets and…
The dynamic nature of life's ability to thrive in diverse and changing planetary environments suggests that habitability and survival depend on the evolutionary path and life adaptation to environmental conditions. Here we explore such…
With 40 or more transiting exoplanets now known, the time is ripe to seek patterns and correlations among their observed properties, which may give important insights into planet formation, structure, and evolution. This task is made…
Most stars, perhaps even all stars, form in crowded stellar environments. Such star forming regions typically dissolve within ten million years, while others remain bound as stellar groupings for hundreds of millions to billions of years,…
No true extrasolar Earth analog is known. Hundreds of planets have been found around Sun-like stars that are either Earth-sized but on shorter periods, or else on year-long orbits but somewhat larger. Under strong assumptions, exoplanet…