Related papers: Where can we find Super-Earths?
The diversity and quantity of moons in the Solar System suggest a manifold population of natural satellites exist around extrasolar planets. Of peculiar interest from an astrobiological perspective, the number of sizable moons in the…
The study of planets beyond the solar system and the search for other habitable planets and life is just beginning. Ground-based (radial velocity and transits) and space-based surveys (transits and astrometry) will identify planets spanning…
We still do not understand how planets form, or why extra-solar planetary systems are so different from our own solar system. But the last few years have dramatically changed our view of the discs of gas and dust around young stars.…
For the origin of the radially concentrated solar system's terrestrial planets, planet formation from a ring of solids at about 1 au from the Sun with convergent/suppressed type I migration is preferred. On the other hand, many super-Earths…
Terrestrial planets in temperate orbits around very low mass stars are likely to have evolved in a very different way than solar system planets, and in particular Earth. However, because these are the first planets that are and will be…
Exoplanet discoveries have motivated numerous efforts to find unseen populations of exomoons, yet they have been unsuccessful. A plausible explanation is that most discovered planets are located on close-in orbits, which would make their…
The hundreds of multiple planetary systems discovered by the \textit{Kepler} mission are typically observed to reside in close-in ($\lesssim0.5$ AU), low-eccentricity, and low-inclination orbits. We run N-body experiments to study the…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
Jupiter and Saturn have extended, nearly toroidal atmospheres composed of material ejected from their moons or rings. Here we suggest that similar atmospheres must exist around giant extrasolar planets and might be observable in a transit…
In the last 15 years, since the discovery of the first low-mass planets beyond the solar system, there has been tremendous progress in understanding the diversity of (super-)Earth and sub-Neptune exoplanets. Especially the influence of the…
The recent discoveries of giant planets around nearby stars have galvanized the planetary science community, astronomers, and the public at large. Since {\it direct} detection is now feasible, and is suggested by the recent acquisition of…
We have shown that Earth-mass planets could survive in variously restricted regions of the habitable zones (HZs) of most of a sample of nine of the 102 main-sequence exoplanetary systems confirmed by 25 September 2003. In a preliminary…
We investigate pathways for the formation of icy super-Earth mass planets orbiting at 125-250 AU around a 1 solar mass star. An extensive suite of coagulation calculations demonstrates that swarms of 1 cm to 10 m planetesimals can form…
Giant planets are expected to form at orbital radii that are relatively large compared to transit and radial velocity detections (>1 AU). As a result, giant planet formation is best observed through direct imaging. By simulating the…
Since the discovery of the first extrasolar giant planets around Sun-like stars, evolving observational capabilities have brought us closer to the detection of true Earth analogues. The size of an exoplanet can be determined when it…
Exoplanets with substantial Hydrogen/Helium atmospheres have been discovered in abundance, many residing extremely close to their parent stars. The extreme irradiation levels these atmospheres experience causes them to undergo hydrodynamic…
The currently feasible method of detection of Earth-mass planets is transit photometry, with detection probability decreasing with a planet's distance from the star. The existence or otherwise of short-period terrestrial planets will tell…
Within the next few years, the first Earth-mass planets will be discovered around other stars. Some of those worlds will certainly lie within the classical "habitable zone" of their parent stars, and we will quickly move from knowing of no…
More than 450 exoplanets have currently been detected, most of them by the radial velocity (RV) technique. While the majority of exoplanets have been found around main-sequence (MS) FGK stars (M 1.5M*), only a small fraction (- 10%) have…
During planet formation, a gas giant will interact with smaller protoplanets that stray within its sphere of gravitational influence. We investigate the outcome of interactions between gas giants and terrestrial-sized protoplanets with…