Related papers: Observations of Exocomets
The Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020 highlights the importance of advancing research focused on discovering and characterizing habitable worlds. In line with this priority, our goal is to investigate how planetary systems…
How can scientists conclude with high confidence that an exoplanet hosts life? As telescopes come on line over the next 20 years that can directly observe photons from terrestrial exoplanets, this question will dictate the activities of…
The dust tails of comets similar to Hale-Bopp can scatter as much optical light as does the Earth. Space-based observatories such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder or Darwin that will detect extra-solar terrestrial planets also will be able…
Astronomical surveys have identified numerous exoplanets with bulk compositions that are unlike the planets of the Solar System, including rocky super-Earths and gas-enveloped sub-Neptunes. Observing the atmospheres of these objects…
Isotopic ratios provide a powerful tool for understanding the origins of materials, including the volatile and refractory matter within solar system bodies. Recent high sensitivity observations of molecular isotopologues, in particular with…
The physical bases of the detection and characterisation of extrasolar planets in the reflected light and thermal emission regimes are reviewed. They both have their advantages and disadvantages, including artefacts, in the determination of…
The known extrasolar planets exhibit many interesting and surprising features--extremely short-period orbits, high-eccentricity orbits, mean-motion and secular resonances, etc.--and have dramatically expanded our appreciation of the…
Stars and their exoplanets evolve together. Depending on the physical characteristics of these systems, such as age, orbital distance and activity of the host stars, certain types of star-exoplanet interactions can dominate during given…
The discovery of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun has accelerated over the past decade, and this trend will continue as new space- and ground-based observatories employ next-generation instrumentation to search the skies for…
The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
From an observational standpoint, stellar activity poses a critical challenge to exoplanet science, as it inhibits the detection of planets and the precise measurement of their parameters. Radial velocity and transit searches revealed a…
Following the widespread practice of exoplanetary transit simulations, various presumed components of an extrasolar system can be examined in numerically simulated transits, including exomoons, rings around planets, and the deformation of…
Thousands of transiting exoplanets have been discovered to date, thanks in great part to the {\em Kepler} space mission. As in all populations, and certainly in the case of exoplanets, one finds unique objects with distinct characteristics.…
In this work, we explore several ways to detect possible exocomet transits in the TESS (The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) light curves. The first one has been presented in our previous work, a machine learning approach based on the…
We investigate whether rings around extrasolar planets could be detected from those planets' transit lightcurves. To this end we develop a basic theoretical framework for calculating and interpreting the lightcurves of ringed planet…
Co-orbital exoplanets are a by-product of the models of formation of planetary systems. However, none have been detected in nature thus far. Although challenging, the observation of co-orbital exoplanets would provide valuable information…
The exquisite photometric precision of the Kepler space telescope now puts the detection of extrasolar moons at the horizon. Here, we firstly review observational and analytical techniques that have recently been proposed to find exomoons.…
The geophysics of extrasolar planets is a scientific topic often regarded as standing largely beyond the reach of near-term observations. This reality in no way diminishes the central role of geophysical phenomena in shaping planetary…
Magnetic fields play a crucial role in planetary evolution and habitability. While the intrinsic magnetic fields of solar system planets are relatively well understood, the magnetic properties of exoplanets remain largely unconstrained,…
Nearly 30 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet around a main sequence star, thousands of planets have now been confirmed. These discoveries have completely revolutionized our understanding of planetary systems, revealing types…