Probing the Physics of Planets and Stars with Transit Data

Summary

Virtually all exoplanet detection and characterisation methods are based on time-domain data. This invited talk gave an overview of some recent results in the field, highlighting some of the time-series-specific challenges encountered along the way. In particular it focussed on planetary transits: how to detect shallow, rare transits in noisy data, and how to model them with extreme accuracy to extract information about the transiting planet's atmosphere. Space-based transit surveys also constitute an extraordinary goldmine of information on stellar variability, and the talk touched briefly upon some recent statistical work in that field.