Related papers: Current Challenges Facing Planet Transit Surveys
Our incomplete understanding of the formation of gas giants and of their mass-radius relationship has motivated ground-based, wide-field surveys for new transiting extrasolar giant planets. Yet, astrophysical false positives have dominated…
Various techniques are being used to search for extra-solar planetary signatures, including accurate measurement of radial velocity and positional (astrometric) displacements, gravitational microlensing, and photometric transits. Planned…
This paper reviews the basic technical characteristics of the ground-based photometric searches for transiting planets, and discusses a possible observational selection effect. I suggest that additional photometric observations of the…
The upcoming TESS mission will detect thousands of candidate transiting exoplanets. Those candidates require extensive follow-up observations to distinguish genuine planets from false positives, and to resolve the physical properties of the…
We investigate a new approach to the detection of companions to extrasolar planets beyond the transit method. We discuss the possibility of the existence of binary planets. We develop a method based on the imaging of a planet-companion as…
Transmission spectroscopy during planetary transits is expected to be a major source of information on the atmospheres of small (approximately Earth-sized) exoplanets in the next two decades. This technique, however, is intrinsically…
Two consecutive transits of planetary companion OGLE-TR-111b were observed in the I band. Combining these observations with data from the literature, we find that the timing of the transits cannot be explained by a constant period, and that…
Exoplanet transit events are attractive targets for the ultrahigh-resolution capabilities afforded by optical interferometers. The intersection of two developments in astronomy enable direct imaging of exoplanet transits: first,…
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has successfully discovered thousands of exoplanet candidates using the transit method, including hundreds of stars with multiple transiting planets. In order to estimate the frequency of these valuable…
Radial velocity searches for extrasolar planets have recently detected several very low mass (7-20M_Earth) planets in close orbits with periods <10 days. We consider the prospects for detecting the analogs of these planets in Galactic open…
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…
CONTEXT. It is theoretically possible for rings to have formed around extrasolar planets in a similar way to that in which they formed around the giant planets in our solar system. However, no such rings have been detected to date. AIMS: We…
The KELT project was originally designed as a small-aperture, wide-field photometric survey that would be optimally sensitive to planets transiting bright (V~8-10) stars. This magnitude range corresponded to the gap between the faint…
Wide-field searches for transiting extra-solar giant planets face the difficult challenge of separating true transit events from the numerous false positives caused by isolated or blended eclipsing binary systems. We describe here the…
The Wide Field Camera Transit Survey is a pioneer program aimed to search for extra-solar planets in the near-infrared. The standard data reduction pipeline of the program uses aperture photometry to construct the light curves. We…
One of the objectives of the CoRoT mission is the search for transiting extrasolar planets using high-precision photometry, and the accurate characterization of their fundamental parameters. The CoRoT satellite consecutively observes…
The Kepler Mission is monitoring the brightness of ~150,000 stars searching for evidence of planetary transits. As part of the "Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler" (HEK) project, we report a planetary system with two confirmed planets and one…
We investigate the rate of false planetary transit detection due to blending with eclipsing binaries. Our approach is purely empirical and is based on the analysis of the artificially blended light curves of the eclipsing binary stars in…
The presence of silicate material in known rings in the Solar System raises the possibility of ring systems existing even within the snow line -- where most transiting exoplanets are found. Previous studies have shown that the detection of…
So far radial velocity (RV) measurements have discovered ~25 stars to host multiple planets. The statistics imply that many of the known hosts of transiting planets should have additional planets, yet none have been solidly detected. They…