Related papers: Sensitivity of Transit Searches to Habitable Plane…
We present an improved estimate of the occurrence rate of small planets orbiting small stars by searching the full four-year Kepler data set for transiting planets using our own planet detection pipeline and conducting transit injection and…
Of the approximately 350 extrasolar planets currently known, of order 10% orbit evolved stars with radii R >~ 2.5 R_sun. These planets are of particular interest because they tend to orbit more massive hosts, and have been subjected to…
Stellar activity and rotation frustrate the detection of exoplanets through the radial velocity technique. This effect is particularly of concern for M dwarfs, which can remain magnetically active for billions of years. We compile rotation…
Reliable detections of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone remain elusive in the Kepler sample, even for M dwarfs. The Kepler sample was once thought to contain a considerable number of M dwarf stars ($T_\mathrm{eff} < 4000$ K), which…
Terrestrial planets are more likely to be detected if they orbit M dwarfs due to the favorable planet/star size and mass ratios. However, M dwarf habitable zones are significantly closer to the star than the one around our Sun, which leads…
M dwarfs constitute more than 70% of the stars in the solar neighborhood. They are cooler and smaller than Sun-like stars and have less-massive disks which suggests that planets around these stars are more likely to be Neptune-size or…
By targeting nearby M dwarfs, a transit search using modest equipment is capable of discovering planets as small as 2 Earth radii in the habitable zones of their host stars. The MEarth Project, a future transit search, aims to employ a…
The Kepler mission found hundreds of planet candidates within the habitable zones (HZ) of their host star, including over 70 candidates with radii larger than 3 Earth radii ($R_\oplus$) within the optimistic habitable zone (OHZ) (Kane et…
We present the results of an extensive study of the detectability of Earth-sized planets and super-Earths in the habitable zones of cool and low-mass stars using transit timing variation method. We have considered a system consisting of a…
Because of their large numbers, low mass stars may be the most abundant planet hosts in our Galaxy. Furthermore, terrestrial planets in the habitable zones (HZs) around M-dwarfs can potentially be characterized in the near future and hence…
In searches for planetary transits in the field, well over half of the survey stars are typically giants or other stars that are too large to permit straightforward detection of planets. For all-sky searches of bright V<~11 stars, the…
A key goal of the Kepler mission is the discovery of Earth-size transiting planets in "habitable zones" where stellar irradiance maintains a temperate climate on an Earth-like planet. Robust estimates of planet radius and irradiance require…
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…
One of the most promising methods of discovering nearby, low-mass planets in the habitable zones of stars is the precision radial velocity technique. However, there are many challenges that must be overcome to efficiently detect…
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…
Observations of very low-mass stars with Kepler represent an excellent opportunity to search for planetary transits and to characterize optical photometric variability at the cool end of the stellar mass distribution. In this paper, we…
A main goal of NASA's Kepler Mission is to establish the frequency of potentially habitable Earth-size planets (eta Earth). Relatively few such candidates identified by the mission can be confirmed to be rocky via dynamical measurement of…
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…
The probability that an exoplanet transits its host star is high for planets in close orbits, but drops off rapidly for increasing semimajor axes. This makes transit surveys for planets with large semimajor axes orbiting bright stars…
We propose a MIDEX-class space mission with the goal to find and characterize roughly 10,000 transiting planets. When transits occur, a much more detailed characterization of the planet is possible and so a large data base of transiting…