Related papers: Bayesian Hypothesis Testing for Planet Detection
A common task in physics and astronomy is studying which of the competing hypotheses the data prefer. This is usually done by computing the Bayes factor between the two hypotheses, and either interpreting it in terms of the posterior odds…
The photoevaporation model is one of the leading explanations for the evolution of small, close-in planets and the origin of the radius-valley. However, without planet mass measurements, it is challenging to test the photoevaporation…
In support of the Astrobiology Science Strategy, this whitepaper outlines some key technology challenges pertaining to the remote search for life in exoplanetary systems. Finding evidence for life on rocky planets outside of our solar…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will perform a two-year survey of nearly the entire sky, with the main goal of detecting exoplanets smaller than Neptune around bright and nearby stars. There do not appear to be any…
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…
Two decades ago, empirical evidence concerning the existence and frequency of planets around stars, other than our own, was absent. Since this time, the detection of extrasolar planets from Jupiter-sized to most recently Earth-sized worlds…
The search for life on exoplanets is one of the grand scientific challenges of our time. The strategy to date has been to find (e.g., through transit surveys like Kepler) Earth-like exoplanets in their stars habitable zone, then use…
Reflected light photometry of terrestrial exoplanets could reveal the presence of oceans and continents, hence placing direct constraints on the current and long-term habitability of these worlds. Inferring the albedo map of a planet from…
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…
Detection of a planetary ring of exoplanets remains as one of the most attractive but challenging goals in the field. We present a methodology of a systematic search for exoplanetary rings via transit photometry of long-period planets. The…
We investigate a new approach to the detection of companions to extrasolar planets beyond the transit method. We discuss the possibility of the existence of binary planets. We develop a method based on the imaging of a planet-companion as…
We present results from a data challenge posed to the radial velocity (RV) community: namely, to quantify the Bayesian "evidence" for n={0,1,2,3} planets in a set of synthetically generated RV datasets containing a range of planet signals.…
Modern imaging techniques heavily rely on Bayesian statistical models to address difficult image reconstruction and restoration tasks. This paper addresses the objective evaluation of such models in settings where ground truth is…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
The capability of the Terrestrial Planet Finder Interferometer (TPF-I) for planetary signal extraction, including both detection and spectral characterization, can be optimized by taking proper account of instrumental characteristics and…
Of all planet-finding techniques, microlensing is potentially the most sensitive to Earth-mass planets. However, microlensing lightcurves generically yield only the planet-star mass ratio: the mass itself is uncertain to a factor of a few.…
In a Bayesian analysis, the likelihood that specific candidate parameters govern the evolution of a quantum system are conditioned on the outcome of measurements which, in turn, cause measurement backaction on the state of the system [M.…
The presence of companion stars, whether bound or unbound, make correct identification of the planetary hosting star difficult when a planet has been detected through a photometrically blended transiting event. We present an approach that…
Astrometric surveys provide the opportunity to measure the absolute magnitudes of large numbers of stars, but only if the individual line-of-sight extinctions are known. Unfortunately, extinction is highly degenerate with stellar effective…
Searching for transits provides a very promising technique for finding close-in extra-solar planets. Transiting planets present the advantage of allowing one to determine physical properties such as mass and radius unambiguously. The…