Related papers: What to Expect from Transiting Multiplanet Systems
In a transiting planetary system, the presence of a second planet will cause the time interval between transits to vary. These transit timing variations (TTV) are particularly large near mean-motion resonances and can be used to infer the…
Among other things, studies of the formation and evolution of planetary systems currently draw on two important observational resources: the precise characterization available for planets that transit their parent stars and the frequency…
Both ground and space-based transit observatories are poised to significantly increase the number of known transiting planets and the number of precisely measured transit times. The variation in a planet's transit times may be used to infer…
The discovery of young (<800 Myr) transiting planets has provided a new avenue to explore how planets form and evolve over their lifetimes. Mass measurements for these planets would be invaluable, but radial velocity surveys of young…
Transiting exoplanets in multi-planet systems have non-Keplerian orbits which can cause the times and durations of transits to vary. The theory and observations of transit timing variations (TTV) and transit duration variations (TDV) are…
The information gathered from observing planetary systems is not limited to the discovery of planets, but also includes the observational upper limits constraining the presence of any additional planets. Incorporating these upper limits…
Motivated by recent discussions, both in private and in the literature, we use a Monte Carlo simulation of planetary systems to investigate sources of bias in determining the mass-radius distribution of exoplanets for the two primary…
Doppler planet searches revealed that many giant planets orbit close to their host star or in highly eccentric orbits. These and subsequent observations inspired new theories of planet formation that invoke gravitation interactions in…
Following on from Paper I in our series (Xie 2013), we report the confirmation by Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) of a further 30 planets in 15 multiple planet systems, using the publicly available Kepler light curves (Q0-Q16). All of…
The architectures of multiple planet systems can provide valuable constraints on models of planet formation, including orbital migration, and excitation of orbital eccentricities and inclinations. NASA's Kepler mission has identified 1235…
To date, well over a thousand planets have been discovered orbiting other stars, hundreds of them in multi-planet systems. Most of these exoplanets have been detected by either the transit method or the radial velocity method, rather than…
The determination of planetary densities from the masses derived with the radial velocity (RV) and transit-timing variation (TTV) methods reveals discrepancies. Specifically, planets detected through RV exhibit higher densities than those…
Given the tendency of planets to form in multiples, and the observational evidence in support of the existence of potential planet-hosting stars in binaries or clusters, it is expected that extrasolar terrestrial planes are more likely to…
We present a new method for confirming transiting planets based on the combination of transit timingn variations (TTVs) and dynamical stability. Correlated TTVs provide evidence that the pair of bodies are in the same physical system.…
In the coming decades, research in extrasolar planets aims to advance two goals: 1) detecting and characterizing low-mass planets increasingly similar to the Earth, and 2) improving our understanding of planet formation. We present a new…
In transiting planetary systems, the angle between the orbital angular momentum and the stellar spin is usually constrained through the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect observed in radial velocity and can be subject to large uncertainties,…
We consider the potential for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to detect transit timing variations (TTVs) during both its nominal and extended mission phases. Building on previous estimates of the overall yield of planetary…
Transit Timing Variations (TTVs) can provide useful information on compact multi-planetary systems observed by transits, by putting constraints on the masses and eccentricities of the observed planets. This is especially helpful when the…
The two most common techniques for measuring planetary masses - the radial velocity (RV) and the transit timing variations (TTVs) techniques - have been observed to yield systematically different masses for planets of similar radii.…
Precise exoplanet characterization requires precise classification of exoplanet host stars. The masses of host stars are commonly estimated by comparing their spectra to those predicted by stellar evolution models. However,…