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The occultation of background stars by foreground Solar system objects, such as planets and asteroids, has been widely used as an observational probe to study physical properties associated with the foreground sample. Similarly, the…
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…
Since the 1980's it has been becoming increasingly clear that the Solar System's irregular satellites are collisionally evolved. We derive a general model for the collisional evolution of an irregular satellite swarm and apply it to the…
Photometry of short-period planetary systems allows astronomers to monitor exoplanets, their host stars, and their mutual interactions. In addition to the transits of a planet in front of its star and the eclipses of the planet by its star,…
The amplitude and morphology of light curves of solar-like stars change substantially with increasing rotation rate: brightness variations get amplified and become more regular, which has so far not been explained. We develop a modelling…
Detecting binary stars in photometric time series is traditionally done by measuring eclipses. This requires the orbital plane to be aligned with the observer. A new method without that requirement uses stellar oscillations to measure…
An extra-solar planet can be detected by microlensing because the planet can perturb the smooth lensing light curve created by the primary lens. However, it was shown by Gaudi that a subset of binary-source events can produce light curves…
Planets reflect and linearly polarize the radiation that they receive from their host stars. The emergent polarization is sensitive to aspects of the planet atmosphere such as the gas composition and the occurrence of condensates and their…
Stellar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from host stars are an important factor that affects the habitability of exoplanets. Although their solar counterparts have been well observed for decades, it is still very difficult to find solid…
Currently, over forty transiting planets have been discovered by ground-based photometric surveys, and space-based missions like Kepler and CoRoT are expected to detect hundreds more. Follow-up photometric observations from the ground will…
We propose that astronomers will be eventually be able to discriminate between extrasolar Earth-like planets with surface oceans and those without using the shape of phase light curves in the visible and near-IR spectrum. We model the…
Lightcurves have long been used to study stellar activity and have more recently become a major tool in the field of exoplanet research. We discuss the various ways in which stellar activity can influence transit lightcurves, and study the…
The fine precision of photometric data available from missions like Kepler provide researchers with the ability to measure changes in light on the order of tens of parts per million (ppm). This level of precision allows researchers to…
I derive the physical properties of 30 transiting extrasolar planetary systems using a homogeneous analysis of published data. The light curves are modelled with the JKTEBOP code, with attention paid to limb darkening and eccentricity. The…
Future high precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the nature of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light…
The photospheric spot activity of some of the stars with transiting planets discovered by the CoRoT space experiment is reviewed. Their out-of-transit light modulations are fitted by a spot model previously tested with the total solar…
A Fourier transform analysis of 2.5 million spectra in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey was carried out to detect periodic spectral modulations. Signals having the same period were found in only 234 stars overwhelmingly in the F2 to K1 spectral…
There are growing amount of very high-resolution polarized scattered light images of circumstellar disks. Nascent giant planets planets are surrounded by their own circumplanetary disks which may scatter and polarize both the planetary and…
We present the results of an automated variability analysis of the Kepler public data measured in the first quarter (Q1) of the mission. In total, about 150 000 light curves have been analysed to detect stellar variability, and to identify…
Until now, there is no confirmed moon beyond our solar system (exomoon). Exomoons offer us new possibly habitable places which might also be outside the classical habitable zone. But until now, the search for exomoons needs much…