Related papers: Practical Planet Prospecting
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…
Context. Detecting regular dips in the light curve of a star is an easy way to detect the presence of an orbiting planet. COROT is a Franco-European mission launched at the end of 2006, and one of its main objectives is to detect planetary…
Context. Transit detection algorithms are mathematical tools used for detecting planets in the photometric data of transit surveys. In this work we study their application to space-based surveys. Aims: Space missions are exploring the…
The transit method is one of the most relevant exoplanet detection techniques, which consists of detecting periodic eclipses in the light curves of stars. This is not always easy due to the presence of noise in the light curves, which is…
The detection of planetary transits in stellar photometric light-curves is poised to become the main method for finding substantial numbers of terrestrial planets. The French-European mission COROT (foreseen for launch in 2005) will perform…
We present an algorithm that allows fast and efficient detection of transits, including planetary transits, from light-curves. The method is based on building an ensemble of fiducial models and compressing the data using the MOPED…
The search for extrasolar planets is strongly motivated by the goal of characterizing how frequent habitable worlds and life may be within the Galaxy. Whilst much effort has been spent on searching for Earth-like planets, large moons may…
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…
Photometry of stars from the K2 extension of NASA's Kepler mission is afflicted by systematic effects caused by small (few-pixel) drifts in the telescope pointing and other spacecraft issues. We present a method for searching K2 light…
The detection of planetary transits in the light curves of active stars, featuring correlated noise in the form of stellar variability, remains a challenge. Depending on the noise characteristics, we show that the traditional technique that…
Research into light curves from stars (temporal variation of brightness) has completely changed how exoplanets are discovered or characterised. This study including star light curves from the Kepler dataset as a way to discover exoplanets…
With the growing number of projects dedicated to the search for extrasolar planets via transits, there is a need to develop fast, automatic, robust methods with a statistical background in order to efficiently do the analysis. We propose a…
Transits of habitable planets around solar-like stars are expected to be shallow, and to have long periods, which means low information content. The current bottleneck in the detection of such transits is caused in large part by the…
A unique analytical solution of planet and star parameters can be derived from an extrasolar planet transit light curve under a number of assumptions. This analytical solution can be used to choose the best planet transit candidates for…
Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, those most adequate for life to begin and evolve have been sought. Due to observational bias, however, most of the discovered planets so far are gas giants, precluding their habitability.…
From simulations of transit observations, it is found that the detectability of extrasolar planets depends only on two parameters: The signal-to-noise ratio during a transit, and the number of data points observed during transits. All other…
Light curves produced by wide-field exoplanet transit surveys such as CoRoT, Kepler, and TESS are affected by sensor-wide systematic noise which is correlated both spatiotemporally and with other instrumental parameters such as photometric…
Transit photometry is perhaps the most successful method for detecting exoplanets to date. However, a substantial amount of signal processing is needed since the dip in the signal detected, an indication that there is a planet in transit,…
Never before has the detection and characterization of exoplanets via transit photometry been as promising and feasible as it is now, due to the increasing breadth and sensitivity of time domain optical surveys. Past works have made use of…
The increasing number of transiting exoplanets sparked a significant interest in discovering their moons. Most of the methods in the literature utilize timing analysis of the raw light curves. Here we propose a new approach for the direct…