Related papers: No Planet Left Behind: Investigating Planetary Div…
SIM PlanetQuest (Space Interferometry Mission) is a space-borne Michelson interferometer for precision stellar astrometry, with a nine meter baseline, currently slated for launch in 2015. One of the principal science goals is the…
New images of young stars are revolutionizing our understanding of planet formation. ALMA detects large grains in planet-forming disks with few AU scale resolution and scattered light imaging with extreme adaptive optics systems reveal…
The BEBOP (Binaries Escorted By Orbiting Planets) survey is a search for circumbinary planets using the radial velocity spectrographs HARPS and SOPHIE, currently focusing on single-lined binaries with a mass ratio $<0.3$. Circumbinary…
Submillimeter and near-infrared images of cool dusty debris disks and rings suggest the existence of unseen planets. At dusty but non-imaged stars, semi-major axes of associated planets can be estimated from the dust temperature. For some…
Recent direct imaging discoveries suggest a new class of massive, distant planets around A stars. These widely separated giants have been interpreted as signs of planet formation driven by gravitational instability, but the viability of…
We present initial results measuring the companion fraction of metal-poor stars ([Fe/H]$<-$2.0). We are employing the Lick Observatory planet-finding system to make high-precision Doppler observations of these objects. The binary fraction…
Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…
Many exoplanets are discovered in binary star systems in internal or in circumbinary orbits. Whether the planet can be habitable or not depends on the possibility to maintain liquid water on its surface, and therefore on the luminosity of…
The discovery of thousands of exoplanets has shown that the birth of planets is a very efficient process in nature. Several physical mechanisms have been proposed to describe the assembly of planets in disks surrounding young stars.…
The goal of the Ariel space mission is to observe a large and diversified population of transiting planets around a range of host star types to collect information on their atmospheric composition. The planetary bulk and atmospheric…
Disk material has been observed around both components of some young close binary star systems. It has been shown that if planets form at the right places within such disks, they can remain dynamically stable for very long times. Herein, we…
Planetary satellites are an integral part of the heirarchy of planetary systems. Here we make two predictions concerning their formation. First, primordial satellites, which have an array of distinguishing characteristics, form only around…
Direct imaging searches have begun to detect planetary and brown dwarf companions and to place constraints on the presence of giant planets at large separations from their host star. This work helps to motivate such planet searches by…
How do planets form from circumstellar disks of gas and dust? What physical processes are responsible for determining the final masses of forming stars and ultimately the initial mass function (IMF)? The Hubble Space Telescope has made…
We have derived beryllium abundances in a wide sample of stars hosting planets, with spectral types in the range F7V-K0V, aimed at studying in detail the effects of the presence of planets on the structure and evolution of the associated…
A large number of direct imaging surveys for exoplanets have been performed in recent years, yielding the first directly imaged planets and providing constraints on the prevalence and distribution of wide planetary systems. However, like…
With its planet detection efficiency reaching a maximum for orbital radii between 1 and 10 AU, microlensing provides a unique sensitivity to planetary systems similar to our own around galactic and even extragalactic stars acting as lenses…
The recent discovery of planets orbiting main sequence binaries will provide crucial constraints for theories of binary and planet formation. The formation pathway for these planets is complicated by uncertainties in the formation mechanism…
The star formation process in molecular clouds usually leads to the formation of multiple stellar systems, mostly binaries. Remaining disks around those stars may be located around individual stars (circumstellar disks) or around the entire…
(Abridged) The probability of detecting additional companions is essentially unchanged with respect to the single-planet configurations, but after fitting and subtraction of orbits with astrometric signal-to-noise ratio $\alpha/\sigma_d\to…