Related papers: Jupiter - friend or foe? II: the Centaurs
The compositional and morphological evolution of minor bodies in the Solar System is primarily driven by the evolution of their heliocentric distances, as the level of incident solar radiation regulates cometary activity. We investigate the…
The Centaur population is composed by minor bodies wandering between the giant planets and that frequently perform close gravitational encounters with these planets, which leads to a chaotic orbital evolution. Recently, the discovery of two…
The wealth of observational data about Jupiter and Saturn provides strong constraints to guide our understanding of the formation of giant planets. The size of the core and the total amount of heavy elements in the envelope have been…
The orbital architecture of the Solar System is thought to have been sculpted by a dynamical instability among the giant planets. During the instability a primordial outer disk of planetesimals was destabilized and ended up on…
Giant impacts, the collisions between planetary embryos, play a crucial role in sculpting the planets and their orbital architectures. Numerical simulations have advanced our understanding of these events, enabling estimations of mass and…
A handful of planetary systems hosting a Hot Jupiter have been subsequently found to also host long-period giant planets. These ``cold Jupiters,'' giant planets residing beyond the snow line ($\sim$3\,au), play an important role in the…
Recent ground and space-based observations show that stars with multiple planets are common in the galaxy. Most of these observational methods are biased toward detecting large planets near to their host stars. Because of these…
Planets are expected to conclude their growth through a series of giant impacts: energetic, global events that significantly alter planetary composition and evolution. Computer models and theory have elucidated the diverse outcomes of giant…
We extend our study of the extent of the regions within the $\alpha$ Centauri AB star system where small planets are able to orbit for billion-year timescales (Quarles & Lissauer 2016, AJ 151, 111) to investigate the effects of minimizing…
The giant planet occurrence rate rises with orbital period out to at least $\sim$300 days. Large-scale planetary migration through the disk has long been suspected to be the physical origin of this feature, as the timescale of standard Type…
The tidal evolution of hot Jupiters may change the efficiency of transit surveys of stellar clusters. The orbital decay that hot Jupiters suffer may result in their destruction, leaving fewer transiting planets in older clusters. We…
The orbital distribution of giant planets is crucial for understanding how terrestrial planets form and predicting yields of exoplanet surveys. Here, we derive giant planets occurrence rates as a function of orbital period by taking into…
A planet orbiting in a disk of planetesimals can experience an instability in which it migrates to smaller orbital radii. Resonant interactions between the planet and planetesimals remove angular momentum from the planetesimals, increasing…
Radial velocity surveys suggest that the Solar System may be unusual and that Jupiter-like planets have a frequency <20% around solar-type stars. However, they may be much more common in one of the closest associations in the solar…
A new classification scheme is introduced for comet-like bodies in the Solar system. It covers the traditional comets as well as the Centaurs and Edgeworth-Kuiper belt objects. At low inclinations, close encounters with planets often result…
The binary star system gamma Cephei is unusual in that it harbours a stable giant planet around the larger star at a distance only about a tenth of that of the stellar separation. Numerical simulations are carried out into the stability of…
Probabilities of collisions of migrating small bodies and dust particles produced by these bodies with planets were studied. Various Jupiter-family comets, Halley-type comets, long-period comets, trans-Neptunian objects, and asteroids were…
A recent paper by Siraj & Loeb (2021) entitled "Breakup of a long-period comet as the origin of the dinosaur extinction" attempts to revive the perennial debate about what type of body hit the Earth 66 million years ago, triggering the…
We examine the effect of secular perturbations by giant planets on systems of multiple, lower mass planets orbiting Sun-like stars. We simulate the effects of forcing both eccentricity and inclination, separately and together. We compare…
The existence of giant planets on wide orbits ($\stackrel{>}{_\sim}100$AU) challenge planet formation theories; the core accretion scenario has difficulty in forming them, whereas the disc instability model forms an overabundance of them…