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Terrestrial planets are thought to be the result of a vast number of gravitational interactions and collisions between smaller bodies. We use numerical simulations to show that practically identical initial conditions result in a wide array…
We use cosmological hydrodynamical simulations of Milky-Way-mass galaxies from the FIRE project to evaluate various strategies for estimating the mass of a galaxy's stellar halo from deep, integrated-light images. We find good agreement…
A planetary instability occurring at time $<100$ My after formation of the giant planets in our solar system can be responsible for some characteristics of the inner solar system. However, the actual influence of the instability on the…
We describe an analytical method for computing the orbital parameters of a planet from the periodogram of a radial velocity signal. The method is very efficient and provides a good approximation of the orbital parameters. The accuracy is…
We study prospects for seismic sounding the layer of a partial mixing above the convective core in main-sequence stars with masses in the 1.2 -- 1.9 solar mass range. There is an initial tendency to an increase of convective core mass in…
Context. Spectroscopy of exoplanet atmospheres at high resolving powers is rapidly gaining popularity to measure the presence of atomic and molecular species. While this technique is robust against contaminant absorption in the Earth's…
The polarization state of starlight reflected by a planetary atmosphere uniquely reveals coverage, particle size, and composition of aerosols as well as changing cloud patterns. It is not possible to obtain a comparable level of detailed…
Owing to the remarkable photometric precision of space observatories like Kepler, stellar and planetary systems beyond our own are now being characterized en masse for the first time. These characterizations are pivotal for endeavors such…
We search for viable f(R) theories of gravity, making use of the equivalence between such theories and scalar-tensor gravity. We find that models can be made consistent with solar system constraints either by giving the scalar a high mass…
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…
This paper explores the stability of an Earth-like planet orbiting a solar mass star in the presence of an outer-lying intermediate mass companion. The overall goal is to estimate the fraction of binary systems that allow Earth-like planets…
Gravitational microlensing is one of the methods to detect exoplanets; planets outside our solar system. Here we focus on theoretical modeling of three lens systems and in particular circumbinary systems. Circumbinary systems include two…
The astrometry technique is an important tool for detecting and characterizing exoplanets of different type. In this review, the different projects which are either operating, in construction or in discussion are presented and their…
Rapid planetary rotation can cause the equilibrium shape of a planet to be oblate. While planetary oblateness has mostly been probed by examining the subtle ingress and egress features in photometric transit light curves, we investigate the…
We compute trivariate probability distributions in the landscape, scanning simultaneously over the cosmological constant, the primordial density contrast, and spatial curvature. We consider two different measures for regulating the…
Detection of the faint 21 cm line emission from the Cosmic Dawn and Epoch of Reionisation will require not only exquisite control over instrumental calibration and systematics to achieve the necessary dynamic range of observations but also…
Seismology of stars that exhibit solar-like oscillations develops a growing interest with the wealth of observational results obtained with the CoRoT and Kepler space-borne missions. In this framework, relations between asteroseismic…
Observational biases distort our view of nature, such that the patterns we see within a surveyed population of interest are often unrepresentative of the truth we seek. Transiting planets currently represent the most informative data set on…
The study of multiple extrasolar planetary systems has the opportunity to obtain constraints for the planetary masses and orbital inclinations via the detection of mutual perturbations. The analysis of precise radial velocity measurements…
In the past few years, there has been a resurgence in studies towards space-based optical/infrared interferometry, particularly with the vision to use the technique to discover and characterise temperate Earth-like exoplanets around solar…