Related papers: A Search for Asteroids, Moons, and Rings Orbiting …
Prior to the 1990s, speculations about the occurrence of planets around other stars were based only on planet formation theory, observations of circumstellar disks, and the knowledge that at least one seemingly ordinary star had managed to…
Planetary debris is observed in the atmospheres of over 1,000 white dwarfs, and two white dwarfs are now observed to contain orbiting minor planets. Exoasteroids and planetary core fragments achieve orbits close to the white dwarf through…
Because the planets of a system form in a flattened disk, they are expected to share similar orbital inclinations at the end of their formation. The high-precision photometric monitoring of stars known to host a transiting planet could thus…
The {\it Kepler} mission has detected thousands of planetary systems with 1-7 transiting planets packed within 0.7~au from their host stars. There is an apparent excess of single-transit planet systems that cannot be explained by transit…
Despite the recent discoveries of planets orbiting stars at all evolutionary stages, the evolution of planetary systems remains poorly understood. Studying planetary systems around red giant branch stars can reveal how main sequence…
Newly formed planets (or brown dwarfs) may possess disks or rings that occupy an appreciable fraction of the planet's Hill sphere and extend beyond the Laplace radius, where the tidal torque from the host star dominates over the torque from…
White dwarfs have atmospheres that are expected to consist nearly entirely of hydrogen and helium, since heavier elements will sink out of sight on short timescales. However, observations have revealed atmospheric pollution by heavier…
The evolution of planetary systems around white dwarfs is crucial to understanding the presence of planetary material in the atmospheres of white dwarfs. These systems uniquely probe exoplanetary compositions. Periodic signals in the…
Doppler planet searches revealed that many giant planets orbit close to their host star or in highly eccentric orbits. These and subsequent observations inspired new theories of planet formation that invoke gravitation interactions in…
It has long been suspected that metal polluted white dwarfs (types DAZ, DBZ, and DZ) and white dwarfs with dusty disks possess planetary systems, but a specific physical mechanism by which planetesimals are perturbed close to a white dwarf…
The Kepler Mission has detected dozens of compact planetary systems with more than four transiting planets. This sample provides a collection of close-packed planetary systems with relatively little spread in the inclination angles of the…
Eighty planetary systems of two or more planets are known to orbit stars other than the Sun. For most, the data can be sufficiently explained by non-interacting Keplerian orbits, so the dynamical interactions of these systems have not been…
We investigate whether rings around extrasolar planets could be detected from those planets' transit lightcurves. To this end we develop a basic theoretical framework for calculating and interpreting the lightcurves of ringed planet…
White dwarfs with a F, G or K type companion represent the last common ancestor for a plethora of exotic systems throughout the galaxy, though to this point very few of them have been fully characterised in terms of orbital period and…
We recommend that the search for exoplanets around binary stars be extended to include X-ray binaries in which the accretor is a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. We present a novel idea for detecting planets bound to such mass…
Asteroid material is detected in white dwarfs (WDs) as atmospheric pollution by metals, in the form of gas/dust discs, or in photometric transits. Within the current paradigm, minor bodies need to be scattered, most likely by planets, into…
Kepler will monitor enough stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the Kepler photometry of such transits with precise radial velocity (RV)…
We classified the reddest ($r-J>2.2$) stars observed by the NASA $Kepler$ mission into main sequence dwarf or evolved giant stars and determined the properties of 4216 M dwarfs based on a comparison of available photometry with that of…
Kepler's quest for other Earths need not end just yet: it remains capable of characterizing cool Earth-mass planets by microlensing, even given its degraded pointing control. If Kepler were pointed at the Galactic bulge, it could conduct a…
Understanding stellar evolution and its effect on planetary systems is crucial for correctly interpreting the chemical constraints of exo-planetary material that can be given to us by white dwarfs. This article will describe how asteroids,…