Related papers: Transit Target Selection Using Reduced Proper Moti…

I investigate the prospects for using the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) to measure the masses of nearby stars from their astrometric deflection of more distant sources, as originally suggested by Paczynski and by Miralda-Escude. I…

Searches for planets around evolved G-K subgiant and giant stars are essential for developing general understanding of planet formation and evolution of the planetary systems. Precise radial velocity (RV) measurements of giants have lead to…

Because the planets of a system form in a flattened disk, they are expected to share similar orbital inclinations at the end of their formation. The high-precision photometric monitoring of stars known to host a transiting planet could thus…

(Abridged) We discuss the design considerations of the EXPLORE (EXtra-solar PLanet Occultation REsearch) project, a series of transiting planet searches using 4-m-class telescopes to continuously monitor a single field of stars in the…

Ground based radial velocity (RV) searches continue to discover exoplanets below Neptune mass down to Earth mass. Furthermore, ground based transit searches now reach milli-mag photometric precision and can discover Neptune size planets…

We present the results of the Distant Giants Survey, a three-year radial velocity (RV) campaign to search for wide-separation giant planets orbiting Sun-like stars known to host an inner transiting planet. We defined a distant giant to have…

Using the Position and Proper Motion Extended-L (PPMXL) catalogue, we have used optical and near-infrared colour cuts together with a reduced proper motion cut to find bright M dwarfs for future exoplanet transit studies. PPMXL's low proper…

In this paper a homomorphic filtering scheme is proposed to improve the estimation of the planet/star radius ratio in astronomical transit signals. The idea is to reduce the effect of the short-term earth atmosphere variations. A two-step…

Planetary transits provide a unique opportunity to investigate the surface distributions of star spots. Our aim is to determine if, with continuous observation (such as the data that will be provided by the Kepler mission), we can in…

Aims. We used realistic three-dimensional (3D) radiative hydrodynamical (RHD) simulations from the Stagger-grid and synthetic images computed with the radiative transfer code Optim3D to provide interferometric observables to extract the…

In the blooming field of exoplanetary science, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets. Kepler's very precise and long-duration photometry is ideal for detecting planetary transits around Sun-like…

We develop a general method to fit the planetary distribution function (PLDF) to exoplanet survey data. This maximum likelihood method accommodates more than one planet per star and any number of planet or target star properties.…

Traditionally runaway stars are O and B type stars with large peculiar velocities.We want to extend this definition to young stars (up to ~50 Myr) of any spectral type and identify those present in the Hipparcos catalogue applying different…

We developed a code that estimates distances to stars using measured spectroscopic and photometric quantities. We employ a Bayesian approach to build the probability distribution function over stellar evolutionary models given these data,…

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has been designed in order to satisfy several different scientific objectives that can be addressed by a ten-year synoptic sky survey. However, LSST will also provide a large amount of data that…

We propose a method for observing transiting exoplanets with near-infrared high-resolution spectrometers. We aim to create a robust data analysis method for recovering atmospheric transmission spectra from transiting exoplanets over a wide…

We introduce our Radial Velocity Survey for Planets around Young stars (RVSPY), characterise our target stars, and search for substellar companions at orbital separations smaller than a few au from the host star. We use the FEROS…

Strong variations of any kind and causes within a stellar light curve may prohibit the detection of transits, particularly of faint or shallow transits caused by small planets passing in front of the stellar disk. The success of future…

The combination of Hipparcos astrometric data with the spectroscopic data of putative extrasolar planets seems to indicate that a significant fraction of these low-mass companions could be brown or M dwarfs Han et al. (2001). We show that…

Transit search programs such as CoRoT and Kepler now have the capability of detecting planets as small as the Earth. The detection of these planets however requires the removal of all false positives. Although many false positives can be…