Related papers: Detecting companions to extrasolar planets using m…

Close-in extrasolar giant planets may be directly detectable by their reflected light, due to the proximity of the planet to the illuminating star. The spectrum of the system will contain a reflected light component that varies in amplitude…

Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in…

When an exoplanet passes behind its host star, we can measure the time of the occultation, its depth, and its color. In this chapter we describe how these observables can be used to deduce physical characteristics of the planet such as its…

The vast majority of extrasolar planets are detected by indirect detection methods such as transit monitoring and radial velocity measurements. While these methods are very successful in detecting short-periodic planets, they are mostly…

Unresolved stellar companions can cause both under-estimations in the radii of transiting planets and over-estimations of their detectability, affecting our ability to reliably measure planet occurrence rates. To quantify the latter, we…

The exoplanet detection is the most exciting and challenging field of astronomy. The discovery of many exoplanets has revolutionized our understanding of the formation and evolution of planetary systems and has showed new ways to search for…

Exoplanets, short for `extra solar planets', are planets outside our solar system. They are objects with masses less than around 15 Jupiter-masses that orbit stars other than the Sun. They are small enough so they can not burn deuterium in…

We survey the methods proposed in the literature for detecting moons of extrasolar planets in terms of their ability to distinguish between prograde and retrograde moon orbits, an important tracer of moon formation channel. We find that…

The timing method, using either stellar pulsations or eclipse timing of close binaries as a clock, is proving to be an efficient way to detect planets around stars that have evolved beyond the red giant branch. In this article we present a…

The analysis of the CoRoT space mission data was performed aiming to test a method that selects, among the several light curves observed, the transiting systems that likely host a low-mass star orbiting the main target. The method…

Detection of a planetary ring of exoplanets remains as one of the most attractive but challenging goals in the field. We present a methodology of a systematic search for exoplanetary rings via transit photometry of long-period planets. The…

We have undertaken an adaptive optics (AO) imaging survey of extrasolar planetary systems and stars showing interesting radial velocity trends from high precision radial velocity searches. AO increases the resolution and dynamic range of an…

Although many methods of detecting extra-solar planets have been proposed and successful implementation of some of these methods enabled a rapidly increasing number of exoplanet detections, little has been discussed about the method of…

For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…

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…

The Palomar High-precision Astrometric Search for Exoplanet Systems (PHASES) has monitored 37 sub-arcsecond binary systems to determine whether their Keplerian orbits are perturbed by faint astrometric companions to either star. Software…

I describe ongoing work on development of Bayesian methods for exploring periodically varying phenomena in astronomy, addressing two classes of sources: pulsars, and extrasolar planets (exoplanets). For pulsars, the methods aim to detect…

Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, those most adequate for life to begin and evolve have been sought. Due to observational bias, however, most of the discovered planets so far are gas giants, precluding their habitability.…

We consider the mass distribution of the nine unseen companions orbiting solar-type stars with minimum possible masses in the planetary mass range reported as of March 1998. We compare the mass distribution of these nine extrasolar planet…

We present an overview of our ongoing systematic search for wide (sub)stellar companions around the stars known to host rad-vel planets. By using a relatively large field of view and going very deep, our survey can find all directly…