Related papers: Coronographic Methods for the Detection of Terrest…
Transiting planet discoveries have yielded a plethora of information regarding the internal structure and atmospheres of extra-solar planets. These discoveries have been restricted to the low-periastron distance regime due to the bias…
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…
Since the first microlensing planet discovery in 2003, more than 200 planets have been detected with gravitational microlensing, in addition to several free-floating planet and black hole candidates. In this chapter the microlensing theory…
Magnetic fields play a crucial role in planetary evolution and habitability. While the intrinsic magnetic fields of solar system planets are relatively well understood, the magnetic properties of exoplanets remain largely unconstrained,…
The space mission CoRoT (COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits) will offer the possibility to detect extrasolar planets by means of the transit method. The satellite will observe about 60000 targets in the range 11.0<V<16.0, located…
Radio Searches for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence aim at detecting artificial transmissions from extra terrestrial communicative civilizations. The lack of prior knowledge concerning these potential transmissions increase the search…
The study of extrasolar planets has rapidly expanded to encompass the search for new planets, measurements of sizes and masses, models of planetary interiors, planetary demographics and occurrence frequencies, the characterization of…
Diffraction fundamentally limits our ability to image and characterize exoplanets. Current and planned coronagraphic searches for exoplanets are making incredible strides but are fundamentally limited by the inner working angle of a few…
Phase masks have numerous applications in astronomical optics, in particular related to two themes: coronography for detection and analysis of extrasolar planets or circumstellar disks, and wavefront analysis for extremely precise adaptive…
The study of transiting extrasolar planets is only 15 years old, but has matured into a rich area of research. I review the observational aspects of this work, concentrating on the discovery of transits, the characterisation of planets from…
Future surveys for transiting extrasolar planets, including the space-based mission Kepler (Borucki et al 2003), are expected to detect hundreds of Jovian mass planets and tens of terrestrial mass planets. For many of these newly discovered…
Thousands of extrasolar planets have been discovered, and it is clear that the galactic planetary census draws on a diversity greatly exceeding that exhibited by the solar system's planets. We review significant landmarks in the chronology…
We ask if Earth-like planets (terrestrial mass and habitable-zone orbit) can be detected in multi-planet systems, using astrometric and radial velocity observations. We report here the preliminary results of double-blind calculations…
The detection of exoplanets in coronographic images is severely limited by residual starlight speckles. Dedicated post-processing can drastically reduce this "stellar leakage" and thereby increase the faintness of detectable exoplanets.…
Detailed characterization of an extrasolar planet's atmosphere provides the best hope for distinguishing the makeup of its outer layers, and the only hope for understanding the interplay between initial composition, chemistry, dynamics &…
Several celestial bodies in co-orbital configurations exist in the solar system. However, co-orbital exoplanets have not yet been discovered. This lack may result from a degeneracy between the signal induced by co-orbital planets and other…
With the advent of optical interferometers that will be coming online in the next decade, radial velocity searches for extra-solar planets will be complemented by high angular resolution astrometric measurements. In this paper, we explore…
The mission of NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars and characterize the atmospheres of these planets using spectroscopy. Because of the enormous brightness ratio between the star and the…
High-contrast imaging for the detection and characterization of exoplanets relies on the instrument's capability to block out the light of the host star. Some current post-processing methods for calibrating out the residual speckles use…
We review the observations of extrasolar planets, ongoing developments in theories of planet formation, orbital migration, and the evolution of multiplanet systems.