| The recent years have shed light on amazing new worlds across the galaxy. It has been demonstrated that the Solar System is only one of many other systems. The Kepler Space Observatory, which was launched by NASA in 2009, has greatly contributed to expand knowledge of exoplanets whose characteristics (how massive they are, their size, orbital period, temperature...) vary on a surprisingly large scale. As an example, the least massive exoplanet known today has twice the mass of the moon. The most massive exoplanet has 29 times the mass of Jupiter. Orbital periods of known planets vary between hours and thousands of years.;In the light of such diversity, it became imaginable that one could find exoplanets that do not necessarily have a spherical shape (or even that of an oblate spheroid such as the Earth). One example is WASP-12b, which orbits so close to its host star that the tidal forces have shaped the planet into an "egg".;As an exoplanet transits in front of the star (primary transit), and is eclipsed behind the star (secondary transit), the subsequent variations in the light flux as received on Earth can allow for the determination of its characteristics. EXONEST, which is a Bayesian exoplanet inference algorithm based on the technique of nested sampling, has been originally designed to infer these characteristics from the light curve as observed in the Kepler data. However, it is not yet equipped to model planets that have an unconventional shape, even in the simple case of an oblate spheroid. Proposing strategies to investigate these shapes mathematically and numerically, and developing tools to help EXONEST identify the possible signatures they could leave on the light curve are the primary focuses of this work. |
