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Solar system planets move on almost circular orbits. In strong contrast, many massive gas giant exoplanets travel on highly elliptical orbits, whereas the shape of the orbits of smaller, more terrestrial, exoplanets remained largely…
It is shown herein that planets with eccentric orbits are more likely to transit than circularly orbiting planets with the same semimajor axis by a factor of (1-e^2)^{-1}. If the orbital parameters of discovered transiting planets are…
The Kepler mission and its successor K2 have brought forth a cascade of transiting planets. Many of these planetary systems exhibit multiple members, but a large fraction possess only a single transiting example. This overabundance of…
We present equations governing the way in which both the orbit and the intrinsic spins of stars in a close binary should evolve subject to a number of perturbing forces, including the effect of a third body in a possibly inclined wider…
We consider the evolution of a binary system interacting due to tidal effects without restriction on the orientation of the orbital, and where significant, spin angular momenta, and orbital eccentricity. We work in the low tidal forcing…
The modestly eccentric and non-coplanar orbits of the giant planets pose a challenge to solar system formation theories which generally indicate that the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk in nearly perfectly circular and…
Many exoplanets in close-in orbits are observed to have relatively high eccentricities and large stellar obliquities. We explore the possibility that these result from planet-planet scattering by studying the dynamical outcomes from a large…
It is standard lore that gravitational radiation reaction circularizes the orbits of inspiralling binary systems. But in recent papers, Loutrel et al. have argued that at late times in such inspirals, one measure of eccentricity actually…
The radial velocity curves of many spectroscopic binaries (SBs) are perturbed by gas streams or proximity effects. For SBs with circular orbits, these perturbations can give rise to spurious orbital eccentricities of high statistical…
We investigate the secular evolution of the orbital semi-major axis and eccentricity due to mass transfer in eccentric binaries, assuming conservation of total system mass and orbital angular momentum. Assuming a delta function mass…
Since exoplanets were detected using the radial velocity method, they have revealed a diverse distribution of orbital configurations. Amongst these are planets in highly eccentric orbits (e > 0.5). Most of these systems consist of a single…
The orbital eccentricity of a single planet around a component of a stellar binary system with a sufficiently large mutual inclination angle is known to oscillate on a secular timescale through the Kozai mechanism. We have investigated the…
Recent studies reveal that the free eccentricities of Kepler-34b and Kepler-413b are much larger than their forced eccentricities, implying that the scattering events may take place in their formation. The observed orbital configuration of…
We study how close-in systems such as those detected by Kepler are affected by the dynamics of bodies in the outer system. We consider two scenarios: outer systems of giant planets potentially unstable to planet--planet scattering, and wide…
Planets in extrasolar systems tend to interact such that their orbits lie near a boundary between apsidal libration and circulation, a "separatrix", with one eccentricity periodically reaching near-zero. One explanation, applied to 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…
We investigate the secular evolution of the orbital semi-major axis and eccentricity due to mass transfer in eccentric binaries, allowing for both mass and angular momentum loss from the system. Adopting a delta function mass transfer rate…
The orbital eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is shaped by a combination of dynamical processes, reflecting both formation conditions and long-term evolution. Probing the orbital dynamics of planets in the kinematic thin and thick…
The Kepler mission discovery of candidate transiting exoplanets (KOIs) enables a plethora of ensemble analysis of the architecture and properties of exoplanetary systems. We compare the observed transit durations of KOIs to a synthetic…
Binary pulsars are ideal to test the foundations of General Relativity, such as Lorentz symmetry, which requires that experiments produce the same results in all free-falling (i.e.inertial) frames. We here break this symmetry in the…