Related papers: Radiative Thrusters on Close-in Extrasolar Planets
In a planetary system, a secular particle resonance occurs at a location where the precession rate of a test particle (e.g. an asteroid) matches the frequency of one of the precessional modes of the planetary system. We investigate the…
Formation of terrestrial planets by agglomeration of planetesimals in protoplanetary disks sensitively depends on the velocity evolution of planetesimals. We describe a novel semi-analytical approach to the treatment of planetesimal…
Aerosols appear to be ubiquitous in exoplanetary atmospheres. However because our understanding of the physical processes that govern aerosols is incomplete, their presence makes the measurement of atmospheric properties, such as molecular…
The majority of Milky Way extrasolar planets likely reside within a few kpc of the Galactic centre. The Galactic tidal forces acting on planets scale inversely with radius in the Galaxy and so are much greater in the inner Galaxy than in…
Nearly everything we know about extrasolar planets to date comes from optical astronomy. While exoplanetary aurorae are predicted to be bright at low radio frequencies (< 1 GHz), we consider the effect of an exoplanet transit on radio…
Stellar activity can reveal itself in the form of radiation (eg, enhanced X-ray coronal emission, flares) and particles (eg, winds, coronal mass ejections). Together, these phenomena shape the space weather around (exo)planets. As stars…
Planets with non-zero obliquity and/or orbital eccentricity experience seasonal variations of stellar irradiation at local latitudes. The extent of the atmospheric response can be crudely estimated by the ratio between the orbital timescale…
This article discusses how re-emission of absorbed solar light by centimeter- to decimeter-sized structures on the surface of an asteroid can create a component of the recoil force parallel to the surface. Under certain conditions the west…
A widely considered characteristic of extra-solar planetary systems has been a seeming tendency for major axes of adjacent orbits to librate in stable configurations. Based on a new catalog of extra-solar planets (Butler et al. 2006) and…
The orbits of some warm Jupiters are highly inclined (20$^\circ$-50$^\circ$) to those of their exterior companions. Comparable misalignments are inferred between the outer and inner portions of some transition discs. These large…
We have computed evolutionary models for extrasolar planets which range in mass from 0.1 to 3.0 Jovian Masses, and which range in equilibrium temperature from 113 K to 2000 K. We present four sequences of models, designed to show the…
The extrasolar planets discovered to date possess unexpected orbital elements. Most orbit their host stars with larger eccentricities and smaller semi-major axes than similarly sized planets in our own solar system do. It is generally…
(Abridged) Inspired by the Kepler planet discoveries, we consider the thermal contraction of planets close to their parent star, under the influence of evaporation. The mass-loss rates are based on hydrodynamic models of evaporation that…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…
Transits of hot Jupiters in X-rays and the ultraviolet have been shown to be both deeper and more variable than the corresponding optical transits. This variability has been attributed to hot Jupiters having extended atmospheres at these…
When a planet transits in front of its host star, a fraction of its light is blocked, decreasing the observed flux from the star. The same is expected to occur when observing the stellar radio flux. However, at radio wavelengths, the planet…
The population of known low- to intermediate-mass exoplanets shows a large spread in densities, which is believed to be due to the diversity of planetary atmospheres and thus controlled by planetary atmospheric mass loss. One of the main…
The torques exerted by a locally isothermal disk on an embedded planet lead to rapid inward migration. Recent work has shown that modeling the thermodynamics without the assumption of local isothermality reveals regions where the net torque…
Asteroidal impact threats to the Earth will be predicted a century or more in advance. Changing an asteroid's albedo changes the force of Solar radiation on it, and hence its orbit. Albedo may be changed by applying a thin ($\sim 0.1\,\mu$)…
The hypothesis of an additional planet in the outer Solar System has gained new support as a result of the confinement noted in the angular orbital elements of distant trans-Neptunian objects. Orbital parameters proposed for the external…