We use the optical and near-infrared photometry from the Kepler Input Catalog to provide improved estimates of the stellar characteristics of the smallest stars in the Kepler target list. We find 3897 dwarfs with temperatures below 4000K, including 64 planet candidate host stars orbited by 95 transiting planet candidates. We refit the transit events in the Kepler light curves for these planet c...

We report precise Doppler measurements of GJ 317 (M3.5 V) that reveal the presence of a planet with a minimum mass MP sin i 1⁄4 1:2 MJup in an eccentric, 692.9 day orbit. GJ 317 is only the third M dwarf with a Doppler-detected Jovian planet. The residuals to a single-Keplerian fit show evidence of a possible second orbital companion. The inclusion of a second Jupiter-mass planet (P 2700 days,M...

The presence of a second planet in a known, transiting-planet system will cause the time between transits to vary. These variations can be used to constrain the orbital elements and mass of the perturbing planet. We analyse the set of transit times of the TrES-1 system given in Charbonneau et al. (2005). We find no convincing evidence for a second planet in the TrES-1 system from that data. By ...

Abstract Sue Bowler takes her seat at The Flowering Desert, an opera inspired by a system of exoplanets, performed in the rarefied atmosphere planetarium

Accurate and up-to-date land cover classification data can be used for interesting applications in different fields; by tracking daily changes of forest cover in areas of interest it is possible to quickly detect illegal deforestation. Environmental scientists can further explore the consequences of climate change by measuring how fast ice cover is melting. Urban planners can track city growth ...

The known extrasolar multiple-planet systems share a surprising dynamical attribute: they cluster just beyond the Hill stability boundary. Here we show that the planet-planet scattering model, which naturally explains the observed exoplanet eccentricity distribution, can reproduce the observed distribution of dynamical configurations. We calculated how each of our scattered systems would appear...

ERA-PLANET is a wide European network comprised of 118 researchers from 35 partner institutions located in 18 countries, aiming to strengthen the European Research Area in the domain of Earth Observation (EO) in coherence with the European participation to the Group on Earth Observation (GEO) and the program for the establishment of a European capacity for Earth Observation, COPERNICUS. It will...

An application of the Planet Simulator is presented to estimate the maximum effect of vegetation on the Earth’s climate. Four sets of sensitivity experiments are performed: (1) All vegetation related land surface parameters are changed simultaneously. (2) Only one effect of vegetation on climate is considered: albedo, surface roughness and soil hydrology. To identify the nature of vegetation-cl...