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The Kepler mission's long-term monitoring of stars through high-precision photometry has not only revealed a plethora of exoplanet transits but also provided valuable data for characterizing a subset of these planets. Using over four years of Kepler observations, we have derived phase curves for over a dozen planets, and use these measurements to constrain their mass, brightness/temperature and energy redistribution between the day and the night sides. In our new study, we also investigate possible offsets of the peak brightness of the phase curve, which could be indicative of inhomogeneous clouds and/or substantial winds in the planet's atmosphere. We find significant offsets for over a half-dozen planets. With this growing sample of measured phase curves, we are able to better examine the trends of hot Jupiter energy budgets and albedos, and for the first time relate these properties to the presence of clouds or winds on a planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large fraction of stars are members of binary systems. Yet, the formation and early evolution of binary and multiple stars is not well understood theoretically and poorly constrained observationally. We present findings from a comprehensive spectroscopic survey for close binaries among nearly 200 members of the Chamaeleon I and Taurus-Auriga star-forming regions. We find that higher mass stars in our sample have a higher spectroscopic binary frequency than their lower mass counterparts, similar to what is seen in the field and for resolved (wide) binaries in young associations. More intriguingly, our observations also reveal a significantly larger fraction of tight binaries in Tau-Aur compared to Cha I, both for F-K stars and for M dwarfs, implying possible regional variations in the formation of multiple stars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]