The Levi-Civita spacetime as a limiting case of the Gamma spacetime

It is shown that the Levi-Civita metric can be obtained from a family of the Weyl metric, the Gamma metric, by taking the limit when the length of its Newtonian image source tends to infinity. In this process a relationship appears between two fundamental parameters of both metrics.Comment: LaTeX2e 17 page

Probing the effect of gravitational microlensing on the measurements of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect

In general, in the studies of transit light-curves and the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM), the contribution of the planet's gravitational microlensing is neglected. Theoretical studies, have, however shown that the planet's microlensing can affect the transit light-curve and in some extreme cases cause the transit depth to vanish. In this letter, we present the results of our quantitative analysis of microlening on the RM effect. Results indicate that for massive planets in on long period orbits, the planet's microlensing will have considerable contribution to the star's RV measurements. We present the details of our study, and discuss our analysis and results.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

SOAP-T: A tool to study the light-curve and radial velocity of a system with a transiting planet and a rotating spotted star

We present an improved version of SOAP (Boisse et al. 2012) named "SOAP-T", which can generate the radial velocity variations and light-curves for systems consisting of a rotating spotted star with a transiting planet. This tool can be used to study the anomalies inside transit light-curves and the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, to better constrain the orbital configuration and properties of planetary systems and active zones of their host stars. Tests of the code are presented to illustrate its performance and to validate its capability when compared with analytical models and real data. Finally, we apply SOAP-T to the active star, HAT-P-11, observed by the NASA Kepler space telescope and use this system to discuss the capability of this tool in analyzing light-curves for the cases where the transiting planet overlaps with the star's spots.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

An exterior for the G\"{o}del spacetime

We match the vacuum, stationary, cylindrically symmetric solution of Einstein's field equations with $\Lambda$, in a form recently given by Santos, as an exterior to an infinite cylinder of dust cut out of a G\"{o}del universe. There are three cases, depending on the radius of the cylinder. Closed timelike curves are present in the exteriors of some of the solutions. There is a considerable similarity between the spacetimes investigated here and those of van Stockum referring to an infinite cylinder of rotating dust matched to vacuum, with $\Lambda=0$.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX 2.09, no figures. Submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit