papers

Publications (38)

astro-ph.EP2026

Hydrogen airglow from an escaping ultrahot Jupiter atmosphere

Yapeng Zhang, Chenliang Huang, Aaron Householder +17

Intense high-energy irradiation of close-in gaseous exoplanets drives the rapid escape of their atmospheres, fundamentally shaping planetary demographics. While atmospheric loss is…

astro-ph.SR2024

The California Legacy Survey V. Chromospheric Activity Cycles in Main Sequence Stars

Howard Isaacson, Andrew W. Howard, Benjamin Fulton +31

We present optical spectroscopy of 710 solar neighborhood stars collected over twenty years to catalog chromospheric activity and search for stellar activity cycles. The California…

astro-ph.SR2022

TESS asteroseismology of the Kepler red giants

Dennis Stello, Nicholas Saunders, Sam Grunblatt +11

Red giant asteroseismology can provide valuable information for studying the Galaxy as demonstrated by space missions like CoRoT and Kepler. However, previous observations have bee…

astro-ph.EP2022

TESS Giants Transiting Giants II: The hottest Jupiters orbiting evolved stars

Samuel K. Grunblatt, Nicholas Saunders, Meng Sun +42

Giant planets on short-period orbits are predicted to be inflated and eventually engulfed by their host stars. However, the detailed timescales and stages of these processes are no…

astro-ph.EP2022

TESS Giants Transiting Giants III: An eccentric warm Jupiter supports a period-eccentricity relation for giant planets transiting evolved stars

Samuel K. Grunblatt, Nicholas Saunders, Ashley Chontos +27

The fate of planets around rapidly evolving stars is not well understood. Previous studies have suggested that relative to the main sequence population, planets transiting evolved…

astro-ph.EP2026

The Occurrence Rate of Nearby Planetary Companions to Hot Jupiters

Lizhou Sha, Andrew M. Vanderburg, Chelsea X. Huang +33

The paper measures how often hot Jupiters have nearby transiting companion planets using TESS data, finding an occurrence rate of about 8%, which informs theories of hot‑Jupiter fo…

#hot jupiters#planetary companions#formation mechanisms#transit surveys
astro-ph.IM2019

Machine Learning for the Zwicky Transient Facility

Ashish Mahabal, Umaa Rebbapragada, Richard Walters +47

The Zwicky Transient Facility is a large optical survey in multiple filters producing hundreds of thousands of transient alerts per night. We describe here various machine learning…

astro-ph.SR2024

TESS asteroseismology of Hydri: a subgiant with a born-again dynamo

Travis S. Metcalfe, Jennifer L. van Saders, Daniel Huber +12

The solar-type subgiant Hyi has long been studied as an old analog of the Sun. Although the rotation period has never been measured directly, it was estimated to be near 27 da…

astro-ph.SR2021

Age-Dating Red Giant Stars Associated with Galactic Disk and Halo Substructures

Samuel K. Grunblatt, Joel C. Zinn, Adrian M. Price-Whelan +12

The vast majority of Milky Way stellar halo stars were likely accreted from a small number (3) of relatively large dwarf galaxy accretion events. However, the timing of t…

astro-ph.SR2018

Kepler's Discoveries Will Continue: 21 Important Scientific Opportunities with Kepler & K2 Archive Data

Geert Barentsen, Christina Hedges, Nicholas Saunders +4

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has collected high-precision, high-cadence time series photometry on 781,590 unique postage-stamp targets across 21 different fields of view. These ob…

astro-ph.EP2025

From Earths to Super-Earths: Five New Small Planets Transiting M Dwarf Stars

Jonathan Gomez Barrientos, Heather A. Knutson, Morgan Saidel +39

Earth-sized planets transiting M dwarf stars present one of the best opportunities with current facilities for studying the atmospheric and bulk compositions of terrestrial worlds.…

astro-ph.IM2020

Systematics-insensitive Periodogram for finding periods in TESS observations of long-period rotators

Christina Hedges, Ruth Angus, Geert Barentsen +3

NASA's TESS mission \citep{tess} has produced high precision photometry of millions of stars to the community. The majority of TESS observations have a duration of 27 days…

astro-ph.EP2024

TESS Giants Transiting Giants. VI. Newly Discovered Hot Jupiters Provide Evidence for Efficient Obliquity Damping after the Main Sequence

Nicholas Saunders, Samuel K. Grunblatt, Ashley Chontos +53

The degree of alignment between a star's spin axis and the orbital plane of its planets (the stellar obliquity) is related to interesting and poorly understood processes that occur…

astro-ph.EP2019

Four Small Planets Buried in K2 Systems: What Can We Learn for TESS?

Christina Hedges, Nicholas Saunders, Geert Barentsen +5

The Kepler, K2, and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) missions have provided a wealth of confirmed exoplanets, benefiting from a huge effort from the planet-hunting and…

astro-ph.SR2018

A catalog of 29 open clusters and associations observed by the Kepler and K2 Missions

Ann Marie Cody, Geert Barentsen, Christina Hedges +5

Over the past nine years, the Kepler and K2 Missions have carried out high precision photometric monitoring of more than half a million stars. Among these targets are 29 clusters a…

astro-ph.EP2026

Revisiting the Exo-Mercury Candidate GJ 367 b with ESPRESSO and a Self-Consistent Tidal Distortion Model

Rena A. Lee, Fei Dai, Ellen M. Price +18

We report revised mass and radius measurements for GJ 367 b, an ultra-short-period (7.7 hr) sub-Earth in a multi-planet system orbiting a nearby (~9 pc) M dwarf host. Previous mass…

astro-ph.SR2026

A Test of Substellar Evolutionary Models with High-Precision Ages from Asteroseismology and Gyrochronology for the Benchmark System HR 7672AB

Yaguang Li, Michael C. Liu, Trent J. Dupuy +35

We present high-precision measurements for HR~7672AB, composed of a Sun-like (G0V) star and an L~dwarf companion. Three nights of precise (70 cm/s) radial velocity (RV) asteroseism…

astro-ph.EP2024

Additional Doppler Monitoring Corroborates HAT-P-11 c as a Planet

Samuel W. Yee, Erik A. Petigura, Howard Isaacson +15

In 2010, Bakos and collaborators discovered a Neptune-sized planet transiting the K-dwarf HAT-P-11 every five days. Later in 2018, Yee and collaborators reported an additional Jovi…

astro-ph.EP2022

The Possible Tidal Demise of Kepler's First Planetary System

Shreyas Vissapragada, Ashley Chontos, Michael Greklek-McKeon +6

We present evidence of tidally-driven inspiral in the Kepler-1658 (KOI-4) system, which consists of a giant planet (1.1, 5.9) orbiting an evolved host s…

astro-ph.EP2021

Giants Transiting Giants I: A Non-inflated Hot Jupiter Orbiting a Massive Subgiant

Nicholas Saunders, Samuel K. Grunblatt, Daniel Huber +27

While the population of confirmed exoplanets continues to grow, the sample of confirmed transiting planets around evolved stars is still limited. We present the discovery and confi…

astro-ph.SR2023

Stellar Cruise Control: Weakened Magnetic Braking Leads to Sustained Rapid Rotation of Old Stars

Nicholas Saunders, Jennifer L. van Saders, Alexander J. Lyttle +8

Despite a growing sample of precisely measured stellar rotation periods and ages, the strength of magnetic braking and the degree of departure from standard (Skumanich-like) spindo…

astro-ph.IM2022

The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package

The Astropy Collaboration, Adrian M. Price-Whelan, Pey Lian Lim +133

The Astropy Project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly-developed Python packages that provide commonly needed functionality to the astronomical communit…

astro-ph.EP2024

The Compositions of Rocky Planets in Close-in Orbits Tend to be Earth-Like

Casey L. Brinkman, Lauren M. Weiss, Daniel Huber +54

Hundreds of exoplanets between 1-1.8 times the size of the Earth have been discovered on close in orbits. However, these planets show such a diversity in densities that some appear…

astro-ph.EP2024

A Testbed for Tidal Migration: the 3D Architecture of an Eccentric Hot Jupiter HD 118203 b Accompanied by a Possibly Aligned Outer Giant Planet

Jingwen Zhang, Daniel Huber, Lauren M. Weiss +31

Characterizing outer companions to hot Jupiters plays a crucial role in deciphering their origins. We present the discovery of a long-period giant planet, HD 118203 c ($m_{c}=11.79…

astro-ph.EP2024

An Earth-sized Planet on the Verge of Tidal Disruption

Fei Dai, Andrew W. Howard, Samuel Halverson +95

TOI-6255~b (GJ 4256) is an Earth-sized planet (1.079 ) with an orbital period of only 5.7 hours. With the newly commissioned Keck Planet Finder (KPF) and CARMEN…

astro-ph.EP2023

An unlikely survivor: a low-density hot Neptune orbiting a red giant star

Samuel Grunblatt, Nicholas Saunders, Daniel Huber +14

Hot Neptunes, gaseous planets smaller than Saturn ( 3-8 R) with orbital periods less than 10 days, are rare. Models predict this is due to high-energy stellar irradi…

astro-ph.EP2025

TOI-6324b: An Earth-Mass Ultra-Short-Period Planet Transiting a Nearby M Dwarf

Rena A. Lee, Fei Dai, Andrew W. Howard +71

We report the confirmation of TOI-6324 b, an Earth-sized (1.059 0.041 R) ultra-short-period (USP) planet orbiting a nearby (20 pc) M dwarf. Using the newly com…

astro-ph.EP2024

Planet Hunters TESS V: a planetary system around a binary star, including a mini-Neptune in the habitable zone

Nora L. Eisner, Samuel K. Grunblatt, Oscar Barragán +61

We report on the discovery and validation of a transiting long-period mini-Neptune orbiting a bright (V = 9.0 mag) G dwarf (TOI 4633; R = 1.05 RSun, M = 1.10 MSun). The planet was…

astro-ph.IM2019

The Pointing Limits of Transiting Exoplanet Light Curve Characterization with Pixel Level De-correlation

Nicholas Saunders, Rodrigo Luger, Rory Barnes

We present scope (Simulated CCD Observations for Photometric Experimentation), a Python package to create a forward model of telescope detectors and simulate stellar targets with m…

astro-ph.EP2026

Extreme winds on the emerging dayside of an ultrahot Jupiter

Yapeng Zhang, Joost P. Wardenier, Aaron Householder +16

High-resolution spectroscopy provides a unique opportunity to directly probe atmospheric dynamics by resolving Doppler shifts of planetary signal as a function of orbital phases. U…

astro-ph.EP2024

The TESS-Keck Survey XXI: 13 New Planets and Homogeneous Properties for 21 Subgiant Systems

Ashley Chontos, Daniel Huber, Samuel K. Grunblatt +67

We present a dedicated transit and radial velocity survey of planets orbiting subgiant stars observed by the TESS Mission. Using nights on Keck/HIRES, we confirm and cha…

astro-ph.SR2025

K-dwarf Radius Inflation and a 10-Gyr Spin-down Clock Unveiled through Asteroseismology of HD 219134 from the Keck Planet Finder

Yaguang Li, Daniel Huber, J. M. Joel Ong +26

We present the first asteroseismic analysis of the K3\,V planet host HD~219134, based on four consecutive nights of radial velocities collected with the Keck Planet Finder. We appl…

astro-ph.EP2024

TESS Giants Transiting Giants. VII. A Hot Saturn Orbiting an Oscillating Red Giant Star

Nicholas Saunders, Samuel K. Grunblatt, Daniel Huber +26

We present the discovery of TOI-7041 b (TIC 201175570 b), a hot Saturn transiting a red giant star with measurable stellar oscillations. We observe solar-like oscillations in TOI-7…

astro-ph.IM2017

An update to the EVEREST K2 pipeline: Short cadence, saturated stars, and Kepler-like photometry down to Kp = 15

Rodrigo Luger, Ethan Kruse, Daniel Foreman-Mackey +2

We present an update to the EVEREST K2 pipeline that addresses various limitations in the previous version and improves the photometric precision of the de-trended light curves. We…

astro-ph.GA2023

The far side of the Galactic bar/bulge revealed through semi-regular variables

Daniel R. Hey, Daniel Huber, Benjamin J. Shappee +8

The Galactic bulge and bar are critical to our understanding of the Milky Way. However, due to the lack of reliable stellar distances, the structure and kinematics of the bulge/bar…

astro-ph.EP2023

TESS Giants Transiting Giants V -- Two hot Jupiters orbiting red-giant hosts

Filipe Pereira, Samuel K. Grunblatt, Angelica Psaridi +24

In this work we present the discovery and confirmation of two hot Jupiters orbiting red-giant stars, TOI-4377 b and TOI-4551 b, observed by TESS in the southern ecliptic hemisphere…

astro-ph.IM2019

eleanor: An open-source tool for extracting light curves from the TESS Full-Frame Images

Adina D. Feinstein, Benjamin T. Montet, Daniel Foreman-Mackey +8

During its two year prime mission the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will perform a time-series photometric survey covering over 80% of the sky. This survey comprises…

astro-ph.EP2025

Discovery of a Jupiter Analog Misaligned to the Inner Planetary System in HD 73344

Jingwen Zhang, Lauren M. Weiss, Daniel Huber +6

We present the discovery of a Jupiter-like planet, HD 73344 d (, AU, ) based on…