Related papers: Assessment of PLATO Science Performance
For extrasolar planets with orbital periods, P>10 days, radial velocity surveys find non-circular orbital eccentricities are common, <e>~0.3. Future surveys for extrasolar planets using the transit technique will also have sensitivity to…
Since the last Pluto volatile transport models were published (Hansen and Paige 1996), we have (i) new stellar occultation data from 2002 and 2006-2012 that have roughly twice the pressure as the discovery occultation of 1988, (ii) new…
COROT will be the first high precision photometric satellite to be launched with the aim of detecting exoplanets by the transit method. In this paper, we present the simulations we have carried out in order to assess the detection…
The increasing number of transiting exoplanets sparked a significant interest in discovering their moons. Most of the methods in the literature utilize timing analysis of the raw light curves. Here we propose a new approach for the direct…
Regular, low-cost Decadal-class science missions to planetary destinations will be enabled by high-{\Delta}V small spacecraft, such as the high-energy Photon, and small launch vehicles, such as Electron, to support expanding opportunities…
Radial-velocity follow-up of stars harbouring transiting planets detected by TESS is expected to require very large amounts of expensive telescope time in the next few years. Therefore, scheduling strategies should be implemented to…
Context. To date, stellar activity is one of the main limitations in detecting small exoplanets via transit photometry. Since this activity is enhanced in young stars, traditional filtering algorithms may severely under-perform in detecting…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will embark in 2018 on a 2-year wide-field survey mission, discovering over a thousand terrestrial, super-Earth and sub-Neptune-sized exoplanets potentially suitable for follow-up…
The occurrence rate of young giant planets from direct imaging surveys is a fundamental tracer of the efficiency with which planets form and migrate at wide orbital distances. These measurements have progressively converged to a value of…
In this short paper, we study the photometric precision of stellar light curves obtained by the CoRoT satellite in its planet finding channel, with a particular emphasis on the timescales characteristic of planetary transits. Together with…
Population studies of Kepler's multi-planet systems have revealed a surprising degree of structure in their underlying architectures. Information from a detected transiting planet can be combined with a population model to make predictions…
We study the planet populations in the discovery window of the CoRoT-space-telescope scheduled for launch on December 27th. We base the prediction on `first principles' calculations of planet formation in the framework of the planetesimal…
In the companion paper we began the task of systematically studying the detection of planets in wide orbits ($a > 1.5 R_E$) via microlensing surveys. In this paper we continue, focusing on repeating events. We find that, if all planetary…
The detectability of moons of extra-solar planets is investigated, focussing on the time-of-arrival perturbation technique, a method for detecting moons of pulsar planets, and the photometric transit timing technique, a method for detecting…
Solar Orbiter is a joint ESA-NASA mission planed for launch in October 2018. The science payload includes remote-sensing and in-situ instrumentation designed with the primary goal of understanding how the Sun creates and controls the…
PLATO will discover exoplanets around Sun-like stars through transit photometry and characterize their host stars using asteroseismology. Since photometry for most PLATO targets will be extracted on board, an efficient strategy to detect…
We use Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the number of extrasolar planets that are directly detectable in the solar-neighborhood using current and forthcoming high-contrast imaging instruments. Our calculations take into account the…
A few weeks after launch, the PLATO spacecraft is expected to start its payload commissioning, which will be completed within the first three months of the mission. This phase includes the in-orbit verification, calibration, and…
PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) is the ESA M3 space mission dedicated to detect and characterise transiting exoplanets including information from the asteroseismic properties of their stellar hosts. The uninterrupted…
The past five years has seen a surge in research and innovative ideas for the imaging of extrasolar planets, particular terrestrial ones. We expect that within the next decade a space observatory will be launched with the objective of…