Related papers: A Dynamical Method for Measuring Masses of Stars w…
The WFIRST microlensing mission will measure precise light curves and relative parallaxes for millions of stars, giving it the potential to characterize short-period transiting planets all along the line of sight and into the galactic…
Observations of circumstellar disks around stars as a function of stellar properties such as mass, metallicity, multiplicity, and age, provide constraints on theories concerning the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Utilizing…
Since 2008 we have run an observational program to accurately measure the characteristics of known exoplanet systems hosting close-in transiting giant planets, i.e. hot Jupiters. Our study is based on high-quality photometric follow-up…
Transiting hot Jupiters present a unique opportunity to measure absolute planetary masses due to the magnitude of their radial velocity signals and known orbital inclination. Measuring planet mass is critical to understanding atmospheric…
Most extrasolar planets have been detected by their influence on their parent star, typically either gravitationally (the Doppler method) or by the small dip in brightness as the planet blocks a portion of the star (the transit method).…
This investigation uses the excellent HARPS radial velocity measurements of CoRoT-7 to re-determine the planet masses and to explore techniques able to determine mass and elements of planets discovered around active stars when the relative…
A planet orbiting in a disk of planetesimals can experience an instability in which it migrates to smaller orbital radii. Resonant interactions between the planet and planetesimals remove angular momentum from the planetesimals, increasing…
Duration and period of transits in extrasolar planetary systems can exhibit long-term variations for a variety of reasons. Here we investigate how systemic proper motion, which steadily re-orients planetary orbit with respect to our line of…
Most studies concerning the growth and evolution of massive planets focus either on their accretion or their migration only. In this work we study both processes concurrently to investigate how they might mutually affect each other. We…
The currently feasible method of detection of Earth-mass planets is transit photometry, with detection probability decreasing with a planet's distance from the star. The existence or otherwise of short-period terrestrial planets will tell…
Some pulsating stars are good clocks. When they are found in binary stars, the frequencies of their luminosity variations are modulated by the Doppler effect caused by orbital motion. For each pulsation frequency this manifests itself as a…
Precision astrometry offers a way to probe new physics. By measuring the angular position of light sources at unprecedented precision, astrometry could probe minuscule fluctuations of underlying spacetime. This work explores the possibility…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect is the distortion of stellar spectral lines that occurs during eclipses or transits, due to stellar rotation. We assess the future prospects for using the RM effect to measure the alignment of planetary…
Under certain conditions, stellar radial velocities can be determined from astrometry, without any use of spectroscopy. This enables us to identify phenomena, other than the Doppler effect, that are displacing spectral lines. The change of…
Star formation is intimately linked to the dynamical evolution of molecular clouds. Turbulent fragmentation determines where and when protostellar cores form, and how they contract and grow in mass via accretion from the surrounding cloud…
Intermediate mass stars and stellar remnants often host planets, and these dynamical systems evolve because of mass loss and tides. This paper considers the combined action of stellar mass loss and tidal dissipation on planetary orbits in…
We simulate the observations of proper motion of stars very close to the Galactic Center. We show that the speckle interferometry done with the Keck II telescope is accurate enough to obtain orbital parameters for stars with the period P…
The radial velocities and direct imaging observations of exoplanets have suggested that the frequency of giant planets may decrease for intermediate-mass stars ($2.5-8\,M_\odot$). The key mechanism that could hinder their formation remains…
We study mass transfers between debris discs during stellar encounters. We carried out numerical simulations of close flybys of two stars, one of which has a disc of planetesimals represented by test particles. We explored the parameter…
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.…