Related papers: Bayesian Hypothesis Testing for Planet Detection
Searching for extrasolar planets by direct detection is extremely challenging for current instrumentation. Indirect methods, that measure the effect of a planet on its host star, are much more promising and have indeed led to the discovery…
Upcoming biosignature searches focus on indirect indicators to infer the presence of life on other worlds. Aside from just signaling the presence of life, however, some biosignatures can contain information about the state that a planet's…
So far, most of the about 5700 exoplanets have been discovered mainly with radial velocity and transit methods. These techniques are sensitive to planets in close orbits, not being able to probe large star--planet separations. $\mu$-lensing…
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…
Bayesian evidence is a standard tool used for comparing the ability of different models to fit available data and is used extensively in cosmology. However, since the evidence calculation involves performing an integral of the likelihood…
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…
Various methods have been proposed to search for extrasolar planets. Compared to the other methods, microlensing has unique applicabilities to the detections of Earth-mass and free-floating planets. However, the microlensing method is…
The timing method, using either stellar pulsations or eclipse timing of close binaries as a clock, is proving to be an efficient way to detect planets around stars that have evolved beyond the red giant branch. In this article we present a…
Exoplanet science promises a continued rapid accumulation of new observations in the near future, energizing a drive to understand and interpret the forthcoming wealth of data to identify signs of life beyond our Solar System. The large…
EXONEST is an algorithm dedicated to detecting and characterizing the photometric signatures of exoplanets, which include reflection and thermal emission, Doppler boosting, and ellipsoidal variations. Using Bayesian Inference, we can test…
I describe ongoing work on development of Bayesian methods for exploring periodically varying phenomena in astronomy, addressing two classes of sources: pulsars, and extrasolar planets (exoplanets). For pulsars, the methods aim to detect…
We report new methods for evaluating realistic observing programs that search stars for planets by direct imaging, where observations are selected from an optimized star list, and where stars can be observed multiple times. We show how…
Given the tendency of planets to form in multiples, and the observational evidence in support of the existence of potential planet-hosting stars in binaries or clusters, it is expected that extrasolar terrestrial planes are more likely to…
The fields of astronomy and astrophysics are currently engaged in an unprecedented era of discovery as recent missions have revealed thousands of exoplanets orbiting other stars. While the Kepler Space Telescope mission has enabled most of…
A mid-infrared nulling-space interferometer is a promising way to characterize thermal light from habitable planet candidates around Sun-like stars. However, one of the main challenges for achieving this ambitious goal is a high-precision…
We present a Bayesian algorithm to combine optical imaging of unresolved objects from distinct epochs and observation platforms for orbit determination and tracking. By propagating the non-Gaussian uncertainties we are able to optimally…
The presence of a body in an orbit around a close eclipsing binary star manifests itself through the light time effect influencing the observed times of eclipses as the close binary and the circumbinary companion both move around the common…
One important strength of the microlensing method in detecting extrasolar planets is its high sensitivity to low-mass planets. However, it is often believed that microlensing detections of Earth-mass planets from ground-based observation…
In an era when we are charting multiple planets per system, one might wonder the extent to which "missing" (or failing to detect) a planet can skew our interpretation of the system architecture. We address this question with a simple…
Context. In exoplanet searches with radial velocity data, the most common statistical significance metrics are the Bayes factor and the false alarm probability (FAP). Both have proved useful, but do not directly address whether an exoplanet…