Prof. Tsevi Mazeh works on a range of topics in exo-planetary and binary observational astrophysics, including: discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets, mainly via transits and the radial velocity techniques; detecting binaries with dormant black hole secondaries via analysis of available light curves; analysis of circumbinary planets; analysis of the Gaia data sets.
Research achievements include: Analysis of Kepler space mission data to derive rotation periods of 34,000 main-sequence stars with the autocorrelation technique, making this the largest sample of stellar rotation periods to date.; derivation of transit timing catalog of 2600 Kepler Objects of Interest (KOIs), using the full 17 quarters of the mission, detecting 260 KOIs that showed significant TTVs with long-term variations; constructing a simple algorithm, BEER, to search for a combination of the BEaming, Ellipsoidal and the Reflection/heating periodic modulations, induced by short-period non-transiting low-mass companions; using this technique to discover a new exoplanet, Kepler-76b, at an orbital period of 1.54 days around a 13.3 mag F star; pointing to the significance of the dearth of exoplanets with Neptune mass and radius with orbital periods below 2-4 d. The existence of this desert is similar to the appearance of the so-called brown-dwarf desert that suggests different formation mechanisms for planets and stellar companions with short orbital periods.
Future directions include: using the massive data sets from new astronomical facilities (Gaia, TESS, SDSS-V) for order-of-magnitude improvements in the discovery of dormant black holes and circumbinary planets.
