Related papers: Inferring planet occurrence rates from radial velo…
The dependence of gas giant planet occurrence rate on stellar metallicity has been firmly established. We extend this so-called planet-metallicity correlation to broader ranges of metallicities and planet masses/radii. In particular, we…
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.…
Radial velocity (RV) follow-up is a critical complement of transiting exoplanet surveys like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS ), both for validating discoveries of exoplanets and measuring their masses. Stellar activity…
Measured spectral shifts due to intrinsic stellar variability (e.g., pulsations, granulation) and activity (e.g., spots, plages) are the largest source of error for extreme precision radial velocity (EPRV) exoplanet detection. Several…
We present an improved estimate of the occurrence rate of small planets orbiting small stars by searching the full four-year Kepler data set for transiting planets using our own planet detection pipeline and conducting transit injection and…
We develop new techniques for estimating the fractional uncertainty (F) in the projected planetary mass (msini) resulting from Keplerian fits to radial-velocity (RV) datasets of known Jupiter-class exoplanets. The techniques include (1)…
We present an improved formula for the anomalous radial velocity of the star during planetary transits due to the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect. The improvement comes from a more realistic description of the stellar absorption line…
Planetary rotation rates and obliquities provide information regarding the history of planet formation, but have not yet been measured for evolved extrasolar planets. Here we investigate the theoretical and observational perspective of the…
Context. Kinematical data such as the mean velocities and velocity dispersions of stellar samples are useful tools to study galactic structure and evolution. However, observational data are often incomplete (e.g., lacking the radial…
Empirical exoplanet mass-radius relations have been used to study the demographics and compositions of small exoplanets for many years. However, the heterogeneous nature of these measurements hinders robust statistical analysis of this…
Previous work has demonstrated that the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has the capability to detect transiting planets around main sequence stars in relatively short ($<$ 20 days) periods and using standard algorithms for transit…
We introduce a new method of searching for and characterizing extra-solar planets. We show that by monitoring the center-of-light motion of microlensing alerts using the next generation of high precision astrometric instruments the…
We explore the possibility that the transit signature of an Earth-size planet can be detected in spectroscopic velocity shifts via the Rossiter effect. Under optimistic but not unrealistic conditions, it should be possible to detect a large…
Planet Planet scattering is a leading dynamical mechanism invoked to explain the present orbital distribution of exoplanets. Many stars belong to binary systems, therefore it is important to understand how this mechanism works in presence…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…
We present observations with the planet finder SPHERE of a selected sample of the most promising radial velocity (RV) companions for high-contrast imaging. Using a Monte Carlo simulation to explore all the possible inclinations of the orbit…
In recent years the number of exoplanets has grown considerably. The most successful techniques in these detections are the radial velocity (RV) and planetary transits techniques, the latter significantly advanced by the Kepler, K2 and,…
We seek to characterize giant-planet systems by their gravitational scattering properties. We do this to a given system by integrating it numerically along with a large number of hypothetical small bodies that are initially in eccentric…
Partial measurements of relative position are a relatively common event during the observation of visual binary stars. However, these observations are typically discarded when estimating the orbit of a visual pair. In this article we…
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…