Related papers: A Search for Asteroids, Moons, and Rings Orbiting …

The presence of planets around solar-type stars suggests that many white dwarfs should have relic planetary systems. While planets closer than $\sim$ 5~AU will most likely not survive the post-main sequence lifetime of its parent star, any…

Stellar activity and rotation frustrate the detection of exoplanets through the radial velocity technique. This effect is particularly of concern for M dwarfs, which can remain magnetically active for billions of years. We compile rotation…

The Kepler Mission is monitoring the brightness of ~150,000 stars searching for evidence of planetary transits. As part of the "Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler" (HEK) project, we report a planetary system with two confirmed planets and one…

White dwarfs rotate. The angular momentum in single white dwarfs must originate early in the life of the star, but also must be modified (and perhaps severely modified) during the many stages of evolution between birth as a main--sequence…

Planets orbiting in the habitable zones of white dwarfs have recently been proposed as promising targets for biosignature searches. However, since the white dwarf habitable zone resides at 0.01 - 0.1 AU, planets residing there are subject…

In an effort to measure the masses of planets discovered by the NASA {\it K2} mission, we have conducted precise Doppler observations of five stars with transiting planets. We present the results of a joint analysis of these new data and…

It is often assumed that the "Kepler dichotomy" -- the apparent excess of planetary systems with a single detected transiting planet in the Kepler catalog -- reflects an intrinsic bimodality in the mutual inclinations of planetary orbits.…

Gas giants orbiting interior to the ice line are thought to have been displaced from their formation locations by processes that remain debated. Here we uncover several new metallicity trends, which together may indicate that two competing…

We investigate the underlying distribution of orbital eccentricities for planets around early-to-mid M dwarf host stars. We employ a sample of 163 planets around early- to mid-M dwarfs across 101 systems detected by NASA's Kepler Mission.…

We argue that all transient searches for planets in globular clusters have a very low detection probability. Planets of low metallicity stars typically do not reside at small orbital separations. The dependance of planetary system…

The accretion of comets onto DA white dwarfs can produce observable metal absorption lines. We show here that comet systems around the progenitor main sequence star are vulnerable to being lost during asymptotic giant branch mass loss, if…

M dwarfs constitute more than 70% of the stars in the solar neighborhood. They are cooler and smaller than Sun-like stars and have less-massive disks which suggests that planets around these stars are more likely to be Neptune-size or…

The Kepler mission has provided high quality light curves for more than 2000 eclipsing binaries. Tertiary companions to these binaries can be detected if they transit one or both stars in the binary or if they perturb the binary enough to…

Star clusters provide an excellent opportunity to study the role of environment on determining the frequencies of short period planets. They provide a large sample of stars which can be imaged simultaneously, with a common distance, age and…

About 25-50% of white dwarfs (WDs) show metal lines in their spectra. Among the widely accepted explanations for this effect is that the these WDs are accreting asteroids that are perhaps flung onto the WDs by a planet via resonance, for…

We report on the orbital architectures of Kepler systems having multiple planet candidates identified in the analysis of data from the first six quarters of Kepler data and reported by Batalha et al. (2013). These data show 899 transiting…

Transiting planet systems offer an unique opportunity to observationally constrain proposed models of the interiors (radius, composition) and atmospheres (chemistry, dynamics) of extrasolar planets. The spectacular successes of ground-based…

In this study, we independently test the presence of an exoplanet around the binary KIC 9472174, which is composed of a red dwarf and a pulsating type B subdwarf. We also present the results of our search for Jupiter-mass objects orbiting…

Small, cool planets represent the typical end-products of planetary formation. Studying the archi- tectures of these systems, measuring planet masses and radii, and observing these planets' atmospheres during transit directly informs…

Polluted white dwarfs offer a unique way to study the bulk compositions of exoplanetary material, but it is not always clear if this material originates from comets, asteroids, moons, or planets. We combine N-body simulations with an…