Related papers: Prospects for Spectroscopic Reflected-light Planet…
Are microlensing searches likely to discover planets that harbor life? Given our present state of knowledge, this is a difficult question to answer. We therefore begin by asking a more narrowly focused question: are conditions on planets…
The closest stars that harbor potentially habitable planets are cool M-stars. Upcoming ground- and space-based telescopes will be able to search the atmosphere of such planets for a range of chemicals. To facilitate this search and to…
This paper reports a blind search for magnetospheric emissions from planets around nearby stars. Young stars are likely to have much stronger stellar winds than the Sun, and because planetary magnetospheric emissions are powered by stellar…
Upcoming space-based coronagraphic instruments in the next decade will perform reflected light spectroscopy and photometry of cool, directly imaged extrasolar giant planets. We are developing a new atmospheric retrieval methodology to help…
Motivated by the possibility that a coronagraph will be put on WFIRST/AFTA, we explore the direct detectability of extrasolar giant planets (EGPs) in the optical. We quantify a planet's detectability by the fraction of its orbit for which…
Detecting light reflected off the dayside of an exoplanet in high-resolution spectroscopic data has proved to be a notoriously difficult endeavour. Despite several attempts, the faint signal has yet to be detected. We present a new effort…
The addition of an external starshade to the {\it Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope} will enable the direct imaging of Earth-radius planets orbiting at $\sim$1 AU. Classification of any detected planets as Earth-like requires both…
A large number of direct imaging surveys for exoplanets have been performed in recent years, yielding the first directly imaged planets and providing constraints on the prevalence and distribution of wide planetary systems. However, like…
(Abridged) We discuss the design considerations of the EXPLORE (EXtra-solar PLanet Occultation REsearch) project, a series of transiting planet searches using 4-m-class telescopes to continuously monitor a single field of stars in the…
Direct detection, also known as direct imaging, is a method for discovering and characterizing the atmospheres of planets at intermediate and wide separations. It is the only means of obtaining spectra of non-transiting exoplanets.…
We study the possibility to detect extrasolar planets in M31 through pixel-lensing observations. Using a Monte Carlo approach, we select the physical parameters of the binary lens system, a star hosting a planet, and we calculate the…
The statistical distribution of the masses of planets about stars between the Sun and the center of the galaxy is constrained to within a factor of three by an intensive search for planets during microlensing events. Projected separations…
Using Monte Carlo simulations we analyze the potential of the upcoming transit survey Pan-Planets. The analysis covers the simulation of realistic light curves (including the effects of ingress/egress and limb-darkening) with both…
Because planets are not expected to be able to form close to stars due to the high temperatures, it has been suggested that the observed close orbiting ($\sim 0.05$ AU) large mass planets ($\sim M_J$) might be mirror worlds -- planets…
In the near-future, dedicated telescopes observe Earth-like exoplanets in reflected light, allowing their characterization. Because of the huge distances, every exoplanet will be a single pixel, but temporal variations in its spectral flux…
Extra-solar planets can be efficiently detected in gravitational microlensing events of high magnification. High accuracy photometry is required over a short, well-defined time interval only, of order 10-30 hours. Most planets orbiting the…
A high level of diversity has already been observed among the planets of our own Solar System. As such, one expects extrasolar planets to present a wide range of distinctive features, therefore the characterisation of Earth- and super…
We use Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the number of extrasolar planets that are directly detectable in the solar-neighborhood using current and forthcoming high-contrast imaging instruments. Our calculations take into account the…
Future missions like Roman, HabEx, and LUVOIR will directly image exoplanets in reflected light. While current near infrared direct imaging searches are only sensitive to young, self-luminous planets whose brightness is independent of their…
Radial velocity surveys for extra-solar planets generally require substantial amounts of large telescope time in order to monitor a sufficient number of stars. Two of the aspects which can limit such surveys are the single-object…