Related papers: Coupled Evolution with Tides of the Radius and Orb…
Recent observations have revealed an intriguing abundance of polar-orbiting Neptune-sized planets, many of which exhibit unusually inflated radii. While such misaligned orbits point to a complex dynamical history, the connection between…
The internal thermal and magnetic evolution of rocky exoplanets is critical to their habitability. We focus on the thermal-orbital evolution of Earth-mass planets around low mass M stars whose radiative habitable zone overlaps with the…
We present a systematic evaluation of the agreement between the observed radii of 90 well-characterized transiting extrasolar giant planets and their corresponding model radii. Our model radii are drawn from previously published…
Obliquity tides are a potentially important source of heat for extrasolar planets on close-in orbits. Although tidal dissipation will usually reduce the obliquity to zero, a nonzero obliquity can persist if the planet is in a Cassini state,…
Most transiting planets orbit very close to their parent star, causing strong tidal forces between the two bodies. Tidal interaction can modify the dynamics of the system through orbital alignment, circularisation, synchronisation, and…
Close-in extrasolar gas giants -- the hot Jupiters -- display departures in radius above the zero-temperature solution, the radius excess, that are anomalously high. The radius excess of hot Jupiters follows a relatively close relation with…
Several short-period Jupiter-mass planets have been discovered around nearby solar-type stars. During the circularization of their orbits, the dissipation of tidal disturbance by their host stars heats the interior and inflates the sizes of…
We calculate the evolution of planets undergoing a strong tidal encounter using smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), for a range of periastron separations. We find that outside the Roche limit, the evolution of the planet is…
Since the discovery of the first transiting hot Jupiters, models have sought to explain the anomalously large radii of highly irradiated gas giants. We now know that the size of hot Jupiter radius anomalies scales strongly with a planet's…
(Abridged) The solar system gas giant planets are oblate due to their rapid rotation. A measurement of the planet's projected oblateness would constrain the planet's rotational period. Planets that are synchronously rotating with their…
The discovery of many giant planets in close-in orbits and the effect of planetary and stellar tides in their subsequent orbital decay have been extensively studied in the context of planetary formation and evolution theories. Planets…
As a planet ages it cools and its radius shrinks, at a rate set by the efficiency with which heat is transported from the interior out to space. The bottleneck for this transport is at the boundary between the convective interior and the…
We calculate radius versus age trajectories for the photometrically-selected transiting extrasolar giant planet, OGLE-TR-56b, and find agreement between theory and observation, without introducing an ad hoc extra source of heat in its core.…
There have been many proposed explanations for the larger-than-expected radii of some transiting hot Jupiters, including either stellar or orbital energy deposition deep in the atmosphere or deep in the interior. In this paper, we explore…
We investigate the prospects for characterizing extrasolar giant planets by measuring planetary oblateness from transit photometry and inferring planetary rotational periods. The rotation rates of planets in the solar system vary widely,…
We investigate the possibility of substantial inflation of short-period Jupiter-mass planets, as a result of their internal tidal dissipation associated with the synchronization and circularization of their orbits. We employ the simplest…
We present evolutionary models for cool brown dwarfs and extra-solar giant planets. The models reproduce the main trends of observed methane dwarfs in near-IR color-magnitude diagrams. We also present evolutionary models for irradiated…
Extending the theory we derived recently for HD209458b to different cases of strongly irradiated gaseous exoplanets, we have calculated the consistent evolution of the new transiting planet, OGLE-TR-56b, for its recently revised mass…
We present the discovery of the transiting exoplanets HAT-P-65b and HAT-P-66b, with orbital periods of 2.6055 d and 2.9721 d, masses of $0.527 \pm 0.083$ M$_{J}$ and $0.783 \pm 0.057$ M$_{J}$ and inflated radii of $1.89 \pm 0.13$ R$_{J}$…
About one-quarter of the extrasolar giant planets discovered so far have orbital distances smaller than 0.1 AU. These ``51Peg b-like'' planets can now be directly characterized, as shown by the planet transiting in front the star HD209458.…