Related papers: Probing Structures of Distant Extrasolar Planets w…
We propose a method that can determine the ellipticities of source stars of microlensing events produced by binary lenses. The method is based on the fact that the products of the caustic-crossing timescale, $\Delta t$, and the cosine of…
Microlensing has recently proven to be a valuable tool to search for extrasolar planets of Neptune- to super-Earth-mass planets at orbits of few AU. Since planetary signals are of very short duration, an intense and continuous monitoring is…
The presence of stellar companions around planet hosting stars influences the architecture of their planetary systems. To find and characterise these companions and determine their orbits is thus an important consideration to understand…
The disciplines of asteroseismology and extrasolar planet science overlap methodically in the branch of high-precision photometric time series observations. Light curves are, amongst others, useful to measure intrinsic stellar variability…
Motivated by the large number of compact extrasolar planetary systems discovered by the Kepler Mission, this paper considers perturbations due to possible additional outer planets. The discovered compact systems sometimes contain multiple…
Debris discs are dusty belts of planetesimals around main-sequence stars, similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our solar system. The planetesimals cannot be observed directly, yet they produce detectable dust in mutual collisions.…
Finding Dyson rings around distant pulsars may involve identifying light curve features that have not been previously identified. Previous studies covered the detection of a ring structure uniformly brightened by the central pulsar, mostly…
Giant planets orbiting stars other than the Sun are clearly detectable through precise radial-velocity measurements of the orbital reflex motion of the parent star. In the four years since the discovery of the companion to the star 51 Peg,…
We analyze the properties of searches devoted to finding planetary transits by observing simple stellar systems, such as globular clusters, open clusters, and the Galactic bulge. We develop the analytic tools necessary to predict the number…
Follow the big stars! I review the theory of detection and parameter measurement of planetary systems by follow-up observations of ongoing microlensing events. Two parameters can generically be measured from the event itself: the…
Direct imaging of exoplanets will allow us to directly observe the planet in reflected light. Such a scenario may eventually allow for the possibility to scan the planetary surface for the presence of artificial structures made by alien…
Microlensing is one of the most powerful methods that can detect extrasolar planets and a future space-based survey with a high monitoring frequency is proposed to detect a large sample of Earth-mass planets. In this paper, we examine the…
Massive stars at cosmological distances can be individually detected during transient microlensing events, when gravitational lensing magnifications may exceed ~1000. Nine such sources were identified in JWST NIRCam imaging of a single…
Spatially resolved scattered-light images of circumstellar (CS) debris in exoplanetary systems constrain the physical properties and orbits of the dust particles in these systems. They also inform on co-orbiting (but unseen) planets,…
Co-rotating spots at different latitudes on the stellar surface generate periodic photometric variability and can be useful proxies to detect Differential Rotation (DR). DR is a major ingredient of the solar dynamo but observations of…
The discovery of over 200 extrasolar planets with the radial velocity (RV) technique has revealed that many giant planets have large eccentricities, in striking contrast with most of the planets in the solar system and prior theories of…
Future high precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the nature of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light…
Gravitational lensing by the dual cusp catastrophes of the cold dark matter (CDM) caustic rings at cosmological distances may provide the tantalizing opportunity to detect CDM indirectly, and discriminate between axions and weakly…
Due to the high efficiency of planet detections, current microlensing planet searches focus on high-magnification events. High-magnification events are sensitive to remote binary companions as well and thus a sample of wide-separation…
We consider small-scale spheroidal clusters of weakly interacting massive particles in our Galaxy as non-compact gravitational microlenses and predict the appearance of caustics in the plane of a lensed source. The crossing of these…