Related papers: Planet finding prospects for the Space Interferome…

The most successful method used so far to search for extrasolar planets is the radial velocity technique, where periodical shifts on the measured emission from a star provide evidence for an orbiting planet. This method has been used on…

Despite numerous search campaigns based on a diverse set of observational techniques, exomoons - prospective satellites of extrasolar planets - remain an elusive and hard-to-pin-down class of objects. Yet, the case for intensifying this…

The primary difficulty with using transits to discover extrasolar planets is the low probability a planet has of transiting its parent star. One way of overcoming this difficulty is to search for transits in dense stellar fields, such as…

We ask if Earth-like planets (terrestrial mass and habitable-zone orbit) can be detected in multi-planet systems, using astrometric and radial velocity observations. We report here the preliminary results of double-blind calculations…

We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…

Context. High-contrast imaging is currently the only available technique for the study of the thermodynamical and compositional properties of exoplanets in long-period orbits. The SPICES project is a coronagraphic space telescope dedicated…

Astrometry is a powerful technique to study the populations of extrasolar planets around nearby stars. It gives access to a unique parameter space and is therefore required for obtaining a comprehensive picture of the properties,…

The radius of a planet is a fundamental parameter that probes its composition and habitability. Precise radius measurements are typically derived from the fraction of starlight blocked when a planet transits its host star. The wide-field…

MassSpec, a method for determining the mass of a transiting exoplanet from its transmission spectrum alone, was proposed by \citet{dew13}. The premise of this method relies on the planet's surface gravity being extracted from the…

Mass and radius are two fundamental properties for characterising exoplanets, but only for a relatively small fraction of exoplanets are they both available. Mass is often derived from radial velocity measurements, while the radius is…

With planets orbiting stars, a planetary mass function should not be seen as a low-mass extension of the stellar mass function, but a proper formalism needs to take care of the fact that the statistical properties of planet populations are…

We investigate the possiblity to detect Earth-like planets, in the visible and the near infrared domains, with ground based Extremely Large Telescopes equipped with adaptive systems capable of providing high Strehl ratios. From a detailed…

The discovery of extra-solar planets is one of the greatest achievements of modern astronomy. The detection of planets with a wide range of masses demonstrates that extra-solar planets of low mass exist. In this paper we describe a mission,…

We explore the science power of space telescopes used to estimate the true masses of known radial-velocity exoplanets by means of astrometry on direct images. We translate a desired mass accuracy (+/10% in our example) into a minimum goal…

We analyze a sample of multiple-exoplanet systems which contain at least 3 transiting planets detected by the Kepler mission ("Kepler multiples"). We use a generalized Titius-Bode relation to predict the periods of 228 additional planets in…

6500+ exoplanets have been detected using various techniques. This prompted the emergence of many recent works on the taxonomy, or classification, of exoplanets. However, there is still no basic, fundamental definition of 'What is a…

Based on the long-term radial-velocity surveys carried out with the McDonald Observatory 2.7m Harlan J. Smith Telescope from 1988 to the present, we derive upper limits to long-period giant planet companions for 31 nearby stars. Data from…

The two Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) missions aim to perform spectroscopy on extrasolar Earths; TPF-C will operate in visible light, and TPF-I will operate in the mid-infrared. Extrasolar Earths are assumed to be roughly 26 magnitude in…

High-precision astrometry at the sub-microarcsecond level opens up a window to study Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars, and to determine their masses. It thus promises to play an important role in exoplanet science…

Thirteen exo-planets have been discovered using the gravitational microlensing technique (out of which 7 have been published). These planets already demonstrate that super-Earths (with mass up to ~10 Earth masses) beyond the snow line are…