Related papers: KELT: The Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope
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…
Transiting planet systems offer an unique opportunity to observationally constrain proposed models of the interiors (radius, composition) and atmospheres (chemistry, dynamics) of extrasolar planets. The spectacular successes of ground-based…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly…
One proposed method for finding terrestrial planets around nearby stars is to use two spacecraft--a telescope and a specially shaped occulter that is specifically designed to prevent all but a tiny fraction of the starlight from diffracting…
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…
A transiting planet invites us to measure its size, mass, orbital parameters, atmospheric composition, and other characteristics. But the invitation can only be accepted if the host star is bright enough for precise measurements of its flux…
We present the Young Exoplanet Transit Initiative (YETI), in which we use several 0.2 to 2.6m telescopes around the world to monitor continuously young (< 100 Myr), nearby (< 1 kpc) stellar clusters mainly to detect young transiting planets…
The field of extrasolar planets is still, in comparison with other astrophysical topics, in its infancy. There have been about 300 or so extrasolar planets detected and their detection has been accomplished by various different techniques.…
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…
The detection of thousands of extrasolar planets by the transit method naturally raises the question of whether potential extrasolar observers could detect the transits of the Solar System planets. We present a comprehensive analysis of the…
This thesis focuses on the detection of extrasolar planets via the transit method, and more specifically addresses issues relevant to the preparation of upcoming space missions such as CoRoT, Kepler, Eddington, aiming to detect terrestrial…
In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…
[Abridged] We have only been able to comprehensively characterize the atmospheres of a handful of transiting planets, because most orbit faint stars. TESS will discover transiting planets orbiting the brightest stars, enabling, in…
Near-infrared photometry of transiting extrasolar planets can be of great scientific value. It is however not straightforward to reach the necessary millimagnitude precision. Here we report on our attempts to observe transits and secondary…
Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in…
The idea of finding extrasolar planets (ESPs) through observations of drops in stellar brightness due to transiting objects has been around for decades. It has only been in the last ten years, however, that any serious attempts to find ESPs…
Gravitational microlensing provides a unique technique to reveal information about extragalactic planets. A network of at least four 2m-class telescopes distributed around the northern hemisphere could probe 15-35 jupiters and 4-10 saturns…
The Hubble Space Telescope is uniquely able to study planets that are observed to transit their parent stars. The extremely stable platform afforded by an orbiting spacecraft, free from the contaminating effects of the Earth's atmosphere,…
We describe a project (transitsearch.org) currently attempting to discover transiting intermediate-period planets orbiting bright parent stars, and we simulate that project's performance. The discovery of such a transit would be an…
We report the results of a prototype photometric search for transiting extrasolar planets using Subaru Suprime-Cam. Out of about 100,000 stars monitored around the Galactic plane (l=90 degree,b=0 degree), we find that 7,700 (27,000) stars…