Related papers: Extra-Solar Planets
The search for a habitable extrasolar planet has long interested scientists, but only recently have the tools become available to search for such planets. In the past decades, the number of known extrasolar planets has ballooned into the…
This chapter reviews various methods of detecting planetary companions to stars from an observational perspective, focusing on radial velocities, astrometry, direct imaging, transits, and gravitational microlensing. For each method, this…
Moderately close binaries are a special class of targets for planet searches. From a theoretical standpoint, their hospitality to giant planets is uncertain and debated. From an observational standpoint, many of these systems present…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
The host stars of extrasolar planets tend to be metal-rich. We have examined the data for these stars for evidence of trends in other galactic parameters, without success. However, several ESP hosts are likely to be members of the thick…
We extend the models presented in Mordasini et al. (2009) to the formation of planets orbiting stars of different masses. We discuss the properties of the resulting synthetic planet population in terms of mass, orbit, and metallicity…
Discovering other worlds the size of our own has been a long-held dream of astronomers. The transiting planets Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, which belong to a multi-planet system, hold a very special place among the many groundbreaking…
Future surveys for transiting extrasolar planets, including the space-based mission Kepler (Borucki et al 2003), are expected to detect hundreds of Jovian mass planets and tens of terrestrial mass planets. For many of these newly discovered…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
Among more than 200 extrasolar planet candidates discovered to date, there is no known planet orbiting around normal binary stars. In this paper, we demonstrate that microlensing is a technique that can detect such planets. Microlensing…
Many of the planets discovered via the radial velocity technique are hot Jupiters in 3-5 day orbits with ~10$% chance of transiting their parent star. However, radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial…
Searching for exoplanets with different methods has always been the focus of astronomers over the past few years. Among multiple planet detection techniques, astrometry stands out for its capability to accurately determine the orbital…
The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation…
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…
I present two catalogs. The first one contains the observed and infered data of all of 133 stars wich harbor confirmed extrasolar planets. For these 133 stars I report the following data: stellar mass; spectral type; luminosity class;…
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
The field of exoplanets is quickly expanding from just the detection of new planets and the measurement of their most basic parameters, such as mass, radius and orbital configuration, to the first measurements of their atmospheric…
In this thesis, I explore two topics in exoplanet science. The first is the prevalence of Earth-size planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. To determine the occurrence of planets having different sizes, orbital periods, and other properties, I…
In order to understand the exoplanet, you need to understand its parent star. Astrophysical parameters of extrasolar planets are directly and indirectly dependent on the properties of their respective host stars. These host stars are very…
We are still in the early days of exoplanet discovery. Astronomers are beginning to model the atmospheres and interiors of exoplanets and have developed a deeper understanding of processes of planet formation and evolution. However, we have…