Related papers: Exoplanetary Spin-Orbit Alignment: Results from th…
Transiting planets in multiple-star systems, especially high-order multiples, make up a small fraction of the known planet population but provide unique opportunities to study the environments in which planets would have formed.…
A question that continues to perplex astronomers is the formation of tight stellar binaries. There is too much angular momentum in a collapsing and fragmenting protostellar cloud to form a stellar binary in situ with a separation less than…
For 61 transiting hot Jupiters, the projection of the angle between the orbital plane and the stellar equator (called the spin-orbit angle) has been measured. For about half of them, a significant misalignment is detected, and retrograde…
In order to study the origin of the architectures of low mass planetary systems, we perform numerical surveys of the evolution of pairs of coplanar planets in the mass range $(1-4)\ \rmn{M}_{\oplus}.$ These evolve for up to $2\times10^7…
Due to stellar rotation, the observed radial velocity of a star varies during the transit of a planet across its surface, a phenomenon known as the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect. The amplitude of the RM effect is related to the radius of…
Stellar obliquity serves as a key diagnostic for tracing the dynamical evolution of bound systems-from giant planets and brown dwarfs to stellar binaries-revealing whether these diverse populations share analogous histories. Here, we report…
Through the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect, several hot Jupiters have been found to exhibit spin-orbit misalignment, and even retrograde orbits. The high obliquity observed in these planets can be attributed to two primary formation mechanisms,…
The two dominant features in the distribution of orbital parameters for close-in exoplanets are the prevalence of circular orbits for very short periods, and the observation that planets on closer orbits tend to be heavier. The first…
The angle between stellar spin axes and planetary orbits -- stellar obliquity -- probes the dynamics of planetary migration and evolution. The obliquities of giant planets have been extensively studied because they are the most easily…
The geometries of near-resonant planetary systems offer a relatively pristine window into the initial conditions of exoplanet systems. Given that near-resonant systems have likely experienced minimal dynamical disruptions, the spin-orbit…
Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are spun up during their accretion phase in a binary system. The exchange of angular momentum between the accretion disk and the star tends to align the spin and orbital angular momenta on a very short time scale…
In planetary systems with sufficiently small inter-planet spacing, close encounters can lead to planetary collisions/mergers or ejections. We study the spin property of the merger products of two giant planets in a statistical manner using…
The holy grail of exoplanet searches is an exo-Earth, an Earth mass planet in the habitable zone around a nearby star. Mass is the most important parameter of a planet and can only be measured by observing the motion of the star around the…
The mutual orbital alignment in multiple planetary systems is an important parameter for understanding their formation. There are a number of elaborate techniques to determine the alignment parameters using photometric or spectroscopic…
We present observations of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect for the transiting exoplanet systems WASP-1, WASP-24, WASP-38 and HAT-P-8, and deduce the orientations of the planetary orbits with respect to the host stars' rotation axes. The…
Despite the wide range of planet-star (mis)alignments in the mature population of transiting exoplanets, the small number of known young transiting planets are nearly all aligned with the rotation axes of their host stars, as determined by…
A transiting extrasolar planet sequentially blocks off the light coming from the different parts of the disk of the host star in a time dependent manner. Due to the spin of the star, this produces an asymmetric distortion in the line…
The degree of spin-orbit alignment in a population of binary stars can be determined from measurements of their orbital inclinations and rotational broadening of their spectral lines. Alignment in a face-on binary guarantees low rotational…
We present high-precision radial velocity observations of WASP-17 throughout the transit of its close-in giant planet, using the MIKE spectrograph on the 6.5m Magellan Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. By modeling the…
The Kepler space mission has detected a large number of exoplanets in multiple transiting planet systems. Previous studies found that these Kepler multiple planet systems exhibit an intra-system uniformity, namely planets in the same system…