Related papers: A Dynamical Method for Measuring Masses of Stars w…
The winds of low-mass stars carry away angular momentum and impact the atmospheres of surrounding planets. Determining the properties of these winds is necessary to understand the mass-loss history of the star and the evolution of…
When a planet transits in front of its host star, a fraction of its light is blocked, decreasing the observed flux from the star. The same is expected to occur when observing the stellar radio flux. However, at radio wavelengths, the planet…
Transmission spectra are differential measurements that utilize stellar illumination to probe transiting exoplanet atmospheres. Any spectral difference between the illuminating light source and the disk-integrated stellar spectrum due to…
During orbital migration of a giant extrasolar planet via ejection of planetesimals (Murray et al.~1998), inner mean motion resonances can be strong enough to cause planetesimals to graze or impact the star. We integrate numerically the…
The probability that an exoplanet transits its host star is high for planets in close orbits, but drops off rapidly for increasing semimajor axes. This makes transit surveys for planets with large semimajor axes orbiting bright stars…
The disciplines of asteroseismology and extrasolar planet science overlap methodically in the branch of high-precision photometric time series observations. Light curves are, amongst others, useful to measure intrinsic stellar variability…
High-precision pulsar timing relies on a solar-system ephemeris in order to convert times of arrival (TOAs) of pulses measured at an observatory to the solar system barycenter. Any error in the conversion to the barycentric TOAs leads to a…
We consider the effects of mutual transits by extrasolar planet-companion systems (in a true binary or a planet-satellite system) on light curves. We show that induced changes in light curves depend strongly on a ratio between a…
When studying transiting exoplanets it is common to assume a spherical planet shape. However short rotational periods can cause a planet to bulge at its equator, as is the case with Saturn whose equatorial radius is almost 10% larger than…
Variability in the time series brightness of a star on a timescale of 8 hours, known as 'flicker', has been previously demonstrated to serve as a proxy for the surface gravity of a star by Bastien et al. (2013). Although surface gravity is…
The mass distributions of dense cores in star-forming regions are measured to have a shape similar to the initial mass function of stars. This has been generally interpreted to mean that the constituent cores will form individual stars or…
Of the approximately 350 extrasolar planets currently known, of order 10% orbit evolved stars with radii R >~ 2.5 R_sun. These planets are of particular interest because they tend to orbit more massive hosts, and have been subjected to…
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…
The transit method, during which a planet's presence is inferred by measuring the reduction in flux as it passes in front of its parent star, is a highly successful exoplanet detection and characterization technique. During transit, the…
After their initial formation, disk galaxies are observed to be rotationally stable over periods of >6 Gyr, implying that any large velocity disturbances of stars and gas clouds are damped rapidly on the timescale of their rotation.…
Asteroseismology provides powerful means to probe stellar interiors. The oscillations frequencies are closely related to stellar interior properties via the density and sound speed profiles. Since these are tightly linked with the mass and…
The understanding of the evolution of early-type stars is tightly related to that of the effects of rapid rotation. For massive stars, rapid rotation combines with their strong radiation-driven wind. The aim of this paper is to investigate…
Kepler allows the measurement of starspot variability in a large sample of field red giants for the first time. With a new method that combines autocorrelation and wavelet decomposition, we measure 361 rotation periods from the full set of…
Circumstellar disks are an essential ingredient of the formation of low-mass stars. It is unclear, however, whether the accretion-disk paradigm can also account for the formation of stars more massive than about 10 solar masses, in which…
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…