Related papers: Assessment of PLATO Science Performance

Several concepts now exist for small, space-based missions to directly characterize exoplanets in reflected light. Here, we develop an instrument noise model suitable for studying the spectral characterization potential of a…

The Kepler Mission, launched on Mar 6, 2009 was designed with the explicit capability to detect Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars using the transit photometry method. Results from just forty-three days of data…

The ESA Ariel mission has been adopted for launch in 2029 and will conduct a survey of around one thousand exoplanetary atmospheres during its primary mission life. By providing homogeneous datasets, with a high SNR and wide wavelength…

We report radial-velocity search for short-period planets in the Pleiades open cluster. We observed 30 Pleiades member stars at the Okayama Astrophysical Observatory (OAO) with High Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph (HIDES). To evaluate and…

We present a framework for the analysis of direct detection planet finding missions using space telescopes. This framework generates simulations of complete missions, with varying populations of planets, to produce ensembles of mission…

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered $\sim$5000 planets and planet candidates after three and a half years of observations. With a planned second Extended Mission spanning Years 5 - 7 on the horizon, now is the…

This work assesses the potential capability of the next generation of high-precision Radial Velocity (RV) instruments for Earth-twin exoplanet detection. From the perspective of the importance of data sampling, the Terra Hunting Experiment…

We present a semi-analytic estimate of the expected yield of single-transit planets from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). We use the TESS Candidate Target List 6 (CTL-6) as an input catalog of over 4 million sources. We…

Recent observations have shown the presence of extra-solar planets in Galactic open stellar clusters, as in the Praesepe (M44). These systems provide a favorable environment for planetary formation due to the high heavy-element content…

The Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey's highest recommended space mission was a Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) to efficiently conduct three kinds of studies: dark energy surveys, exoplanet surveys, and guest surveys.…

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite will conduct a 2-year long wide-field survey searching for transiting planets around bright stars. Many TESS discoveries will be amenable to mass characterization via ground-based radial velocity…

We present preliminary results on the radial velocity follow-up of a planetary transit candidate (P=2.43d, V=15.4) detected during the MACHO project. The photometry is consistent with a grazing transit of an object with radius >=1.8RJ…

CoRoT, which was launched successfully on the 27th of December 2006, is the first space mission to have the search for planetary transits at the heart of its science programme. It is expected to be able to detect transits of planets with…

One of the objectives of the CoRoT mission is the search for transiting extrasolar planets using high-precision photometry, and the accurate characterization of their fundamental parameters. The CoRoT satellite consecutively observes…

With round-the-clock monitoring of galactic bulge microlensing events, the PLANET experiment constrains the abundance and can yield the discovery of planets down to the mass of earth around galactic disk and bulge stars. Data taken until…

Pluto and its satellites will be the most distant objects ever reconnoitered when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft conducts its intensive flyby of this system in 2015. The size-frequency distribution (SFD) of craters on the surfaces in the…

The expected yield of potentially Earth-like planets is a useful metric for designing future exoplanet-imaging missions. Recent yield studies of direct-imaging missions have focused primarily on yield methods and trade studies using "toy"…

Multiple studies have shown that planet-planet scattering plays an important role in the dynamical evolution of planetary systems. For instance, it has been shown that planet-planet scattering can reproduce the eccentricity distribution of…

The recently approved Juno mission will orbit Jupiter for one year in a highly eccentric (r_min=1.06R_Jup, r_max=39R_Jup) polar orbit (i=90 deg) to accurately map, among other things, the jovian magnetic and gravitational fields. Such an…

We present the discovery of a candidate multiply-transiting system, the first one found in the CoRoT mission. Two transit-like features with periods of 5.11 and 11.76d are detected in the CoRoT light curve, around a main sequence K1V star…