Related papers: Mean motion resonances from planet-planet scatteri…
During orbital migration of a giant extrasolar planet via ejection of planetesimals (Murray et al.~1998), inner mean motion resonances can be strong enough to cause planetesimals to graze or impact the star. We integrate numerically the…
Many features of the outer solar system are replicated in numerical simulations if the giant planets undergo an orbital instability that ejects one or more ice giants. During this instability, Jupiter and Saturn's orbits diverge, crossing…
A question driving many studies is whether the thousands of exoplanets known today typically formed where we observe them or formed further out in the disk and migrated in. Early discoveries of giant exoplanets orbiting near their host…
The radius-period distribution of exoplanets has been characterized by the \textit{Kepler} survey, and the empirical mass-radius relation by the subset of \textit{Kepler} planets with mass measurements. We combine the two in order to…
Microlensing surveys suggest the presence of a surprisingly large population of free-floating planets, with a rate of about two Neptunes per star. The origin of such objects is not known, neither do we know if they are truly unbound or are…
The physics of planet formation is investigated using a population synthesis approach. We develop a simple model for planetary growth including pebble and gas accretion, and orbital migration in an evolving protoplanetary disk. The model is…
Hydrodynamical simulations of two giant planets embedded in a gaseous disk have shown that in case of a smooth convergent migration they end up trapped into a mean motion resonance. These findings have led to the conviction that the onset…
An ever-growing observational aggregate of extrasolar planets has revealed that systems of planets that reside in or near mean-motion resonances are relatively common. While the origin of such systems is attributed to protoplanetary…
We develop a simple model of planetary formation, focusing our attention on those planets with masses less than 10 Earth masses and studying particularly the primordial spin parameters of planets resulting from the accretion of…
Exoplanetary systems hosting multiple low-mass planets are thought to have experienced dynamical instability, during which planet-planet collisions and mergers occur; these collisions can impart substantial amount of angular momentum to the…
Mean motion resonances (MMRs) are a key phenomenon in orbital dynamics. The traditional disturbing function expansion in celestial mechanics shows that, at low eccentricities, $p$:$p-q$ MMRs exhibit a clear hierarchy of strengths, scaling…
We explore the possibility that the observed eccentricity distribution of extrasolar planets arose through planet-planet interactions, after the initial stage of planet formation was complete. Our results are based on ~3250 numerical…
An intriguing trend among \kepler's multi-planet systems is an overabundance of planet pairs with period ratios just wide of a mean motion resonance (MMR) and a dearth of systems just narrow of them. Traditional planet formation models are…
The Kepler-36 system consists of two planets that are spaced unusually close together, near the 7:6 mean motion resonance. While it is known that mean motion resonances can easily form by convergent migration, Kepler-36 is an extreme case…
The frequency of planets in binaries is an important issue in the field of extrasolar planet studies, because of its relevance in estimating of the global planet population of our Galaxy and the clues it can give to our understanding of…
There is evidence that most chains of mean motion resonances of type $k$:$k-1$ among exoplanets become unstable once the dissipative action from the gas is removed from the system, particularly for large $N$ (the number of planets) and $k$…
Trends in the planet population with host star mass provide an avenue to constrain planet formation theories. We derive the planet radius distribution function for Kepler stars of different spectral types, sampling a range in host star…
We explore two ways in which objects of planetary masses can form. One is in disk systems like the solar system. The other is in dense clusters where stars and brown dwarfs form. We do not yet have the instrumental accuracy to detect…
With planets orbiting stars, a planetary mass function should not be seen as a low-mass extension of the stellar mass function, but a proper formalism needs to take care of the fact that the statistical properties of planet populations are…
The scattering of small bodies by planets is an important dynamical process in planetary systems. We present an analytical model to describe this process using the simplifying assumption that each particle's dynamics is dominated by a…