相关论文: On the Detection of Exomoons Transiting Isolated P…
Exomoons represent an outstanding challenge in modern astronomy, with the potential to provide rich insights into planet formation theory and habitability. In this work, we stack the phase-folded transits of 284 viable moon hosting Kepler…
Under the current microlensing planet search strategy of monitoring events caused by stellar-mass lenses, only planets located within a narrow region of separations from central stars can be effectively detected. However, with the dramatic…
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…
It is a well-known fact that the presence of a massive perturber interacting with a population of minor bodies following very eccentric orbits can strongly affect the distribution of their nodal distances. The details of this process have…
The Kepler Mission is monitoring the brightness of ~150,000 stars searching for evidence of planetary transits. As part of the "Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler" (HEK) project, we report a planetary system with two confirmed planets and one…
Occultation light curves of exomoons may give information on their albedo and hence indicate the presence of ice cover on the surface. Icy moons might have subsurface oceans thus these may potentially be habitable. The objective of our…
We describe a project (transitsearch.org) currently attempting to discover transiting intermediate-period planets orbiting bright parent stars, and we simulate that project's performance. The discovery of such a transit would be an…
All transiting planet observations are at risk of contamination from 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…
Terrestrial microlens parallax is one of the very few methods that can measure the mass and number density of isolated dark low-mass objects, such as old free-floating planets and brown dwarfs. Terrestrial microlens parallax can be measured…
The Kepler space telescope has detected transits of objects as small as the Earth's Moon, and moons as small as 0.2 Earth masses can be detected in the Kepler data by transit timing and transit duration variations of their host planets.…
When extrasolar planets are observed to transit their parent stars, we are granted unprecedented access to their physical properties. It is only for transiting planets that we are permitted direct estimates of the planetary masses and…
Context: A large number of isolated black holes (IBHs) are expected to populate the Galaxy. However, only one has been confirmed by the analysis of a microlensing event, and no confirmed emission detection from an IBH has been reported so…
Transiting extrasolar planets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation of planets as well as their internal structure. The existence of a secondary eclipse enables further study of the thermal properties of the the planet by…
The motivation, techniques and performance of the ground-based photometric follow-up of transit detections by the CoRoT space mission are presented. Its principal raison d'\^{e}tre arises from the much higher spatial resolution of common…
Moons orbiting extrasolar planets are the next class of object to be observed and characterized for possible habitability. Like the host-planets to their host-star, exomoons have a limiting radius at which they may be gravitationally bound,…
Gravitational microlensing events of high magnification provide exceptional sensitivity to the presence of low-mass planets orbiting the lens star, including planets with masses as low as that of Earth. The essential requirement for the…
Spotted stars in eclipsing binary systems allow us to gather significant information about the stellar surface inhomogeneities that is otherwise impossible from only photometric data. Starspots can be scanned using the eclipse (or transit)…
We evaluate gravitational lensing as a technique for the detection of extrasolar moons. Since 2004 gravitational microlensing has been successfully applied as a detection method for extrasolar planets. In principle, the method is sensitive…
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…
The Kepler mission has detected a number of transiting circumbinary planets (CBPs). Although currently not detected, exomoons could be orbiting some of these CBPs, and they might be suitable for harboring life. A necessary condition for the…