Related papers: A Possible Aeronomy of Extrasolar Terrestrial Plan…

For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…

Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…

Interest among astronomers in the detection of extra-solar planets is accelerating with the growing realization that it may soon be technically feasible. The ongoing renaissance in telescope construction and the anticipated launches of new…

Extraterrestrial technology may exist in the Solar System without our knowledge. This is because the vastness of space, combined with our limited searches to date, implies that any remote unpiloted exploratory probes of extraterrestrial…

Since the first discovery of an extra-solar planet around a main-sequence star, in 1995, the number of detected exoplanets has increased enormously. Over the past two decades, observational instruments (both onboard and on ground-based…

This review focuses on recent results in advancing our understanding of the location and distribution of habitable exo-Earth environments. We first review the qualities that define a habitable planet/moon environment. We extend these…

In addition to planets and other small bodies, stellar systems will likely also host exozodiacal dust, or exozodi. This warm dust primarily resides in or near the habitable zone of a star, and scatters stellar light in visible to NIR…

Transmission spectroscopy has proven to be an effective technique for characterizing exoplanet atmospheres. However, transmission spectroscopy requires planetary transits, which occur for only a small fraction of planetary systems due to…

Gravitational microlensing is one of the methods to detect exoplanets; planets outside our solar system. Here we focus on theoretical modeling of three lens systems and in particular circumbinary systems. Circumbinary systems include two…

During the last few years, considerable effort has been directed towards large-scale (>> $1 Billion US) missions to detect and characterize earth-like planets around nearby stars, such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer (TPF-I)…

With the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the search for planets like Earth and life in the universe, is quickly gaining momentum. In the future, large space observatories could directly detect the light scattered from…

We have explored a method for finding giant planets in the outer Solar System by detecting their thermal emission and proper motion between two far-infrared all-sky surveys separated by 23.4 years, taken with the InfraRed Astronomical…

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.…

Over the past three decades instruments on the ground and in space have discovered thousands of planets outside the solar system. These observations have given rise to an astonishingly detailed picture of the demographics of short-period…

Dozens of habitable zone, approximately earth-sized exoplanets are known today. An emerging frontier of exoplanet studies is identifying which of these habitable zone, small planets are actually habitable (have all necessary conditions for…

All planets and satellites of our solar system are subject to a continuous rain of material, ranging in size from specks of dust to objects the size of boulders. Upon impact, these objects deposit their kinetic energy into the incident…

The atmospheres of exoplanets reveal all their properties beyond mass, radius, and orbit. Based on bulk densities, we know that exoplanets larger than 1.5 Earth radii must have gaseous envelopes, hence atmospheres. We discuss contemporary…

For centuries, astronomers have discussed the possibility of inhabited worlds - from Herschel's 18th-century observations suggesting Mars may host life, to the systematic search for technosignatures that began in the 1960s using radio…

High-resolution spectroscopy (HRS) has grown into one of the main techniques to characterise the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. High spectral resolving power allows for the efficient removal of telluric and host-star contamination.…

The direct observation of extrasolar planets and their spectra is coming into reach with the new generation of ground-based near-IR interferometers, like the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). The high contrast between star and…