Related papers: Exoplanets and the Rossiter-McLaughlin Effect
The Rossiter-McLaughlin effect occurs during a planet's transit. It provides the main means of measuring the sky-projected spin-orbit angle between a planet's orbital plane, and its host star's equatorial plane. Observing the…
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…
Due to stellar rotation, the observed radial velocity of a star varies during the transit of a planet across its surface, a phenomenon known as the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect. The amplitude of the RM effect is related to the radius of…
In this paper I will review the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect; its history, how it manifests itself during stellar eclipses and planetary transits, and the increasingly important role its measurements play in guiding our understanding of…
One possible diagnostic of planet formation, orbital migration, and tidal evolution is the angle psi between a planet's orbital axis and the spin axis of its parent star. In general, psi cannot be measured, but for transiting planets one…
The discovery of transiting extrasolar planets has enabled us a number of interesting stduies. Transit photometry reveals the radius and the orbital inclination of transiting planets, and thereby we can learn the true mass and the density…
The transiting extrasolar planet XO-3b is remarkable, with a high mass and eccentric orbit. The unusual characteristics make it interesting to test whether its orbital plane is parallel to the equator of its host star, as it is observed for…
A planetary transit produces both a photometric signal and a spectroscopic signal. Precise observations of the transit light curve reveal the planetary radius and allow a search for timing anomalies caused by satellites or additional…
Planetary rotation rates and obliquities provide information regarding the history of planet formation, but have not yet been measured for evolved extrasolar planets. Here we investigate the theoretical and observational perspective of the…
A transiting extrasolar planet sequentially blocks off the light coming from the different parts of the disk of the host star in a time dependent manner. Due to the spin of the star, this produces an asymmetric distortion in the line…
Observing the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect during a planetary transit allows the determination of the angle $\lambda$ between the sky projections of the star's spin axis and the planet's orbital axis. Such observations have revealed a large…
The detection of extrasolar planets' atmospheres requires very demanding observations. For planets that can not be spatially separated from their host stars, i.e. the vast majority of planets, the transiting planets are the only ones…
Planetary rings produce a distinct shape distortion in transit lightcurves. However, to accurately model such lightcurves the observations need to cover the entire transit, especially ingress and egress, as well as an out-of-transit…
We determine the stellar, planetary, and orbital properties of the transiting planetary system HD 209458, through a joint analysis of high-precision radial velocities, photometry, and timing of the secondary eclipse. Of primary interest is…
We report a measurement of the Rossiter--McLaughlin effect in the transiting extrasolar planetary system TrES-1, via simultaneous spectroscopic and photometric observations with the Subaru and MAGNUM telescopes. By modeling the radial…
We obtain analytical expressions for the velocity anomaly due to the Rossiter- McLaughlin effect, for the case when the anomalous radial velocity is obtained by cross-correlation with a stellar template spectrum. In the limit of vanishing…
We present new spectroscopic and photometric observations of the HAT-P-1 planetary system. Spectra obtained during three transits exhibit the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, allowing us to measure the angle between the sky projections of the…
Of the 26 transiting exoplanet systems with measurements of the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect, eight have now been found to be significantly spin-orbit misaligned in the plane of the sky. Unfortunately, the RM effect only measures the…
In eclipsing binaries the stellar rotation of the two components will cause a rotational Doppler beaming during eclipse ingress and egress when only part of the eclipsed component is covered. For eclipsing binaries with fast spinning…
The angle between the spin axis of the host star and the orbit of its planets (i.e., the stellar obliquity) is precious information about the formation and evolution of exoplanetary systems. Measurements of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect…