Tools for discovering and characterizing extrasolar planets

Abstract

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 the understanding of the evolution and formation of planetary systems: from the observations of photometric transits, the interior structure of the planet and atmospheric properties can also be constrained. The most efficient way to search for transiting extrasolar planets is based on wide-field surveys by hunting for short and shallow periodic dips in light curves covering quite long time intervals. These surveys monitor fields with several degrees in diameter and tens or hundreds of thousands of objects simultaneously. In the practice of astronomical observations, surveys of large field-of-view are rather new and therefore require special methods for photometric data reduction that have not been used before. In this PhD thesis, I summarize my efforts related to the development of a complete software solution for high precision photometric reduction of astronomical images. I also demonstrate the role of this newly developed package and the related algorithms in the case of particular discoveries of the HATNet project. [abridged]

PhD thesis, Eotvos Lorand University (June 18, 2009), 68 pages in journal style, 41 figures, 18 tables

References in corpus (3)

• HAT-P-11b: A Super-Neptune Planet Transiting a Bright K Star in the Kepler Field
• An analytical solution for Kepler's problem
• De-Trending Time Series for Astronomical Variability Surveys

Cited by in corpus (13)

• HATSouth: a global network of fully automated identical wide-field telescopes
• HAT-P-13b,c: a transiting hot Jupiter with a massive outer companion on an eccentric orbit
• HAT-P-14b: A 2.2 Jupiter-mass exoplanet transiting a bright F star
• HAT-P-30b: A transiting hot Jupiter on a highly oblique orbit
• Refined stellar, orbital and planetary parameters of the eccentric HAT-P-2 planetary system
• TICs 167692429 and 220397947: The first compact hierarchical triple stars discovered with TESS
• HAT-P-25b: a Hot-Jupiter Transiting a Moderately Faint G Star
• HAT-P-31b,c: A Transiting, Eccentric, Hot Jupiter and a Long-Period, Massive Third-Body
• Transit timing variations in the HAT-P-13 planetary system
• Pushing the limits, episode 2: K2 observations of extragalactic RR Lyrae stars in the dwarf galaxy Leo IV
• Analysis of radial velocity variations in multiple planetary systems
• A Photometric Variability Survey of Field K and M Dwarf Stars with HATNet
• Photometry of a photometer