Related papers: Exoplanet Transit Parallax
The light curve of an exoplanetary transit can be used to estimate the planetary radius and other parameters of interest. Because accurate parameter estimation is a non-analytic and computationally intensive problem, it is often useful to…
Transits on single stars are rare. The probability rarely exceeds a few per cent. Furthermore, this probability rapidly approaches zero at increasing orbital period. Therefore transit surveys have been predominantly limited to the inner…
Due to the exquisite photometric precision, transiting exoplanet discoveries from the Kepler mission are enabling several new techniques of confirmation and characterization. One of these newly accessible techniques analyzes the phase…
Existing upper limits on variations in the photospheric radius of the Sun during the solar magnetic activity cycle are at a fractional amplitude of 2x10^{-4}. At that level, the transit duration of a close-in planet around a Sun-like star…
Exoplanets, or planets outside our own solar system, have long been of interest to astronomers; however, only in the past two decades have scientists had the technology to characterize and study planets so far away from us. With advanced…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
Astrometric detection of an unseen companion is based on analysis of apparent motion of its host star around the system's barycentre. Systems with orbital period close to one year may escape detection if orbital motion of their host stars…
Grazing transits present a special problem for statistical studies of exoplanets. Even though grazing planetary orbits are rare (due to geometric selection effects), for many low to moderate signal-to-noise cases, a significant fraction of…
This paper studies the effects of dynamical interactions among the planets in observed extrasolar planetary systems, including hypothetical additional bodies, with a focus on secular perturbations. These interactions cause the…
The discovery of over 200 extrasolar planets with the radial velocity (RV) technique has revealed that many giant planets have large eccentricities, in striking contrast with most of the planets in the solar system and prior theories of…
This paper considers whether the population of known transiting exoplanets provides evidence for additional outer planets on inclined orbits, due to the perturbing effect of such planets on the orbits of inner planets. As such, we develop a…
A planet's orbital orientation relative to an observer's line of sight determines the chord length for a transiting planet, i.e., the projected distance a transiting planet travels across the stellar disc. For a given circular orbit, the…
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…
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…
Two consecutive transits of planetary companion OGLE-TR-111b were observed in the I band. Combining these observations with data from the literature, we find that the timing of the transits cannot be explained by a constant period, and that…
Most of the known transiting exoplanets are in short-period orbits, largely due to the bias inherent in detecting planets through the transit technique. However, the eccentricity distribution of the known radial velocity planets results in…
There are several physical processes that mediate the interaction between an exoplanet and its host star, with the four main ones being due to magnetic, particle (stellar outflow), radiative and tidal interactions. These interactions can be…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…
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…
Both ground and space-based transit observatories are poised to significantly increase the number of known transiting planets and the number of precisely measured transit times. The variation in a planet's transit times may be used to infer…