Related papers: Transit Detectability of Ring Systems Around Extra…
Among various techniques to search for extra-solar planets, microlensing has some unique characteristics. Contrary to all other methods which favour nearby objects, microlensing is sensitive to planets around stars at distances of several…
We calculate the theoretical evolution of the radii of all fourteen of the known transiting extrasolar giant planets (EGPs) for a variety of assumptions concerning atmospheric opacity, dense inner core masses, and possible internal power…
Transit timing variations - deviations from strict periodicity between successive passages of a transiting planet - can be used to probe the structure and dynamics of multiple-planet systems. In this paper, we examine prospects for…
Transmission spectroscopy of Earth-like exoplanets is a potential tool for habitability screening. Transiting planets are present-day "Rosetta Stones" for understanding extrasolar planets because they offer the possibility to characterize…
Planetary rings are not only ubiquitous around the giant planets in the outer Solar System, but have also been discovered around several small distant bodies. In contrast, no rings have been observed around any inner Solar System objects.…
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…
We present photometry of HD 189733 during eight transits of its close-in giant planet, and out-of-transit photometry spanning two years. Using the transit photometry, we determine the stellar and planetary radii and the photometric…
Doppler planet searches have discovered that giant planets follow orbits with a wide range of orbital eccentricities, revolutionizing theories of planet formation. The discovery of hundreds of exoplanet candidates by NASA's Kepler mission…
The proposed Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will survey the entire sky to locate the nearest and brightest transiting extrasolar planets with orbital periods up to about 36 days. Here we estimate the number and kind of…
Among more than 200 extrasolar planet candidates discovered to date, there is no known planet orbiting around normal binary stars. In this paper, we demonstrate that microlensing is a technique that can detect such planets. Microlensing…
Exoplanets, or planets outside our own solar system, have long been of interest to astronomers; however, only in the past two decades have scientists had the technology to characterize and study planets so far away from us. With advanced…
Planetary materials orbiting white dwarf stars reveal the ultimate fate of the planets of the Solar System and all known transiting exoplanets. Observed metal pollution and infrared excesses from debris disks support that planetary systems…
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…
I derive the physical properties of 30 transiting extrasolar planetary systems using a homogeneous analysis of published data. The light curves are modelled with the JKTEBOP code, with attention paid to limb darkening and eccentricity. The…
NASA's Kepler Mission promises to detect transiting Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of solar-like stars. In addition, it will be poised to detect the reflected light component from close-in extrasolar giant planets (CEGPs)…
The general relativistic precession rate of periastra in close-in exoplanets can be orders of magnitude larger than the magnitude of the same effect for Mercury. The realization that some of the close-in exoplanets have significant…
Many of the directly imaged self-luminous gas giant exoplanets have been found to have cloudy atmospheres. Scattering of the emergent thermal radiation from these planets by the dust grains in their atmospheres should locally give rise to…
Recent observations revealed that several extremely low-density exoplanets show featureless transmission spectra. While atmospheric aerosols are a promising explanation for both the low density and featureless spectra, there is another…
With about 700 confirmed extrasolar planets, it is time to move beyond discovery and towards characterization. Perhaps the most basic parameter of an extrasolar planet is its mass; however, this is very difficult to determine if the planet…
In the last decade, over a million stars were monitored to detect transiting planets. Manual interpretation of potential exoplanet candidates is labor intensive and subject to human error, the results of which are difficult to quantify.…