Related papers: Practical Planet Prospecting
Photometry from Kepler has revealed the presence of cool starspots on the surfaces of thousands of stars, presenting a wide range of spot morphologies and lifetimes. Understanding the lifetime and evolution of starspots across the main…
The last decade has witnessed a rapid growth of the field of exoplanet discovery and characterisation. However, several big challenges remain, many of which could be addressed using machine learning methodology. For instance, the most…
We present a new method for differentiating between planetary transits and eclipsing binaries based on the presence of the ellipsoidal light variations. These variations can be used to detect stellar secondaries with masses ~0.2 M_sun…
Transit and radial velocity searches are two techniques for identifying nearby extrasolar planets to Earth that transit bright stars. Identifying a robust sample of these exoplanets around bright stars for detailed atmospheric…
In the late 1990s, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) team conducted the second phase of their long-term monitoring programme, OGLE-II, which since has been superseded by OGLE-III. All the monitoring data of this second…
The detectability of moons of extra-solar planets is investigated, focussing on the time-of-arrival perturbation technique, a method for detecting moons of pulsar planets, and the photometric transit timing technique, a method for detecting…
Both ground and space-based transit observatories are poised to significantly increase the number of known transiting planets and the number of precisely measured transit times. The variation in a planet's transit times may be used to infer…
Transiting exoplanets provide access to data to study the mass-radius relation and internal structure of extrasolar planets. Long-period transiting planets allow insight into planetary environments similar to the Solar System where, in…
The probability of the detection of Earth-like exoplanets may increase in the near future after the launch of the space missions using the transit photometry as observation method. By using this technique only the semi-major axis of the…
One of the great quests of astronomy is to obtain the spectrum of a terrestrial planet orbiting within the habitable zone of its star, and the dominant challenge in doing so is to isolate the light of the planet from that of the star.…
There are more than 5000 confirmed and validated planets beyond the solar system to date, more than half of which were discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. The catalog of Kepler's exoplanet candidates has only been extensively analyzed…
Kepler will monitor a sufficient number of stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the exquisite Kepler photometry of such transits with precise…
We examined which exo-systems contain moons that may be detected in transit. We numerically modeled transit light curves of Earth-like and giant planets that cointain moons with 0.005--0.4 Earth-mass. The orbital parameters were randomly…
We develop a method for predicting the yield of transiting planets from a photometric survey given the parameters of the survey (nights observed, bandpass, exposure time, telescope aperture, locations of the target fields, observational…
We review the state of the art in follow-up photometry for planetary transit searches. Three topics are discussed: (1) Photometric monitoring of planets discovered by radial velocity to detect possible transits (2) Follow-up photometry of…
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…
It is shown herein that planets with eccentric orbits are more likely to transit than circularly orbiting planets with the same semimajor axis by a factor of (1-e^2)^{-1}. If the orbital parameters of discovered transiting planets are…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…
With over 1800 planets discovered outside of the Solar System in the past two decades, the field of exoplanetology has broadened our perspective on planetary systems. Research priorities are now moving from planet detection to planet…
We propose a MIDEX-class space mission with the goal to find and characterize roughly 10,000 transiting planets. When transits occur, a much more detailed characterization of the planet is possible and so a large data base of transiting…