Related papers: On artificial transits feasibility and SETI
We propose using large Air Cerenkov Telescopes (ACT's) to search for optical, pulsed signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence. Such dishes collect tens of photons from a nanosecond-scale pulse of isotropic equivalent power of tens of…
Observing extrasolar planetary transits is one of the only ways that we may infer the masses and radii of planets outside the Solar System. As such, the detections made by photometric transit surveys are one of the only foreseeable ways…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence by looking for signals from advanced technological civilizations has been ongoing for some decades. We suggest that it could possibly be made more efficient by focusing on stars from which the…
Direct detection of dark matter continues to elude scientists' many attempts to see it interact, and still to this day the only way we know it is there is through observed gravitational effects. The many search experiments are at the point…
It has been previously shown that moons of extrasolar planets may be detectable with the Kepler Mission, for moon masses above ~0.2 Earth masses Kipping et al. 2009c. Transit timing effects have been formerly identified as a potent tool to…
All transiting planets are at risk of contamination by blends with nearby, unresolved stars. Blends dilute the transit signal, causing the planet to appear smaller than it really is, or produce a false positive detection when the target…
Characterizing the geometry of an object orbiting around a star from its transit light curve is a powerful tool to uncover various complex phenomena. This problem is inherently ill-posed, since similar or identical light curves can be…
Most detected transiting planets have orbits which would fit within the one of Mercury, exposing them to intense stellar irradiation and interactions that significantly alter their properties. In contrast, colder planets with longer orbital…
Planets may be rotationally flattened, and their oblateness thus provide useful information on their formation and evolution. Here we develop a new algorithm that can compute the transit light curve due to an oblate planet very efficiently…
Because the planets of a system form in a flattened disk, they are expected to share similar orbital inclinations at the end of their formation. The high-precision photometric monitoring of stars known to host a transiting planet could thus…
Astronomical transients are stellar objects that become temporarily brighter on various timescales and have led to some of the most significant discoveries in cosmology and astronomy. Some of these transients are the explosive deaths of…
We investigate gravitational lensing effects of an extrasolar planet transiting its host star. We focus on the `rising spikes' of the light curve just before and after the transit, which is a peculiar feature of the gravitational lensing,…
Star clusters provide an excellent opportunity to study the role of environment on determining the frequencies of short period planets. They provide a large sample of stars which can be imaged simultaneously, with a common distance, age and…
How would observers differentiate Beacons from pulsars or other exotic sources, in light of likely Beacon observables? Bandwidth, pulse width and frequency may be distinguishing features. Such transients could be evidence of civilizations…
Deep learning techniques have been well explored in the transiting exoplanet field; however, previous work mainly focuses on classification and inspection. In this work, we develop a novel detection algorithm based on a well proven object…
It is well known that planets with radii between that of Earth and Neptune have been the most commonly detected to-date. To classify these planets as either terrestrial or gaseous, typically we turn to mass-radius relations and composition…
Nearly everything we know about extrasolar planets to date comes from optical astronomy. While exoplanetary aurorae are predicted to be bright at low radio frequencies (< 1 GHz), we consider the effect of an exoplanet transit on radio…
Observations of very low-mass stars with Kepler represent an excellent opportunity to search for planetary transits and to characterize optical photometric variability at the cool end of the stellar mass distribution. In this paper, we…
I present a review of observational efforts to study known extrasolar planets by methods that are complementary to the radial velocity technique. I describe the current state of attempts to detect and characterize such planets by…
Transits of bright stars offer a unique opportunity to study detailed properties of extrasolar planets that cannot be determined through radial-velocity observations. We propose a new technique to find such systems using all-sky…