Related papers: Keplerian Orbits and Dynamics of Exoplanets
Chaotic dynamics are expected during and after planet formation, and a leading mechanism to explain large eccentricities of gas giant exoplanets is planet-planet gravitational scattering. The same scattering has been invoked to explain…
Exoplanets, short for `extra solar planets', are planets outside our solar system. They are objects with masses less than around 15 Jupiter-masses that orbit stars other than the Sun. They are small enough so they can not burn deuterium in…
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…
This chapter reviews various methods of detecting planetary companions to stars from an observational perspective, focusing on radial velocities, astrometry, direct imaging, transits, and gravitational microlensing. For each method, this…
It is shown herein that planets with eccentric orbits are more likely to transit than circularly orbiting planets with the same semimajor axis by a factor of (1-e^2)^{-1}. If the orbital parameters of discovered transiting planets are…
As shown by Johannes Kepler in 1609, in the two-body problem, the shape of the orbit, a given ellipse, and a given non-vanishing constant angular momentum determines the motion of the planet completely. Even in the three-body problem, in…
Astrometric measurements of stellar systems are becoming significantly more precise and common, with many ground and space-based instruments and missions approaching 1 microarcsecond precision. We examine the multi-wavelength astrometric…
In principle, the combined measurements of the mass and radius a giant exoplanet allow one to determine the relative fraction of hydrogen and helium and of heavy elements in the planet. However, uncertainties on the underlying physics imply…
We survey theoretical and experimental/observational results on general-relativistic spin (rotation) effects in binary systems. A detailed discussion is given of the two-body Kepler problem and its first post-Newtonian generalization,…
To date, well over a thousand planets have been discovered orbiting other stars, hundreds of them in multi-planet systems. Most of these exoplanets have been detected by either the transit method or the radial velocity method, rather than…
Extrasolar circumbinary planets are so called because they orbit two stars instead of just one; to date, an increasing number of such planets have been discovered with a variety of techniques. If the orbital frequency of the hosting stellar…
The long-term evolution of stellar orbits bound to a massive centre is studied in order to understand the cores of star clusters in central regions of galaxies. Stellar trajectories undergo tiny perturbation, the origin of which is twofold:…
We develop an analytic model for transit timing variations produced by orbital conjunctions between gravitationally interacting planets. If the planetary orbits have tight orbital spacing, which is a common case among the Kepler planets,…
The stellar spin orientation relative to the orbital planes of multiplanet systems are becoming accessible to observations. Here, we analyze and classify different types of spin-orbit evolution in compact multiplanet systems perturbed by an…
A point mass at the center of an ellipsoidal homogeneous fluid is used as a simple model to study the effect of rotation on the shape and external gravitational field of planets and stars. Maclaurin's analytical result for a homogenous body…
We analyse the potential migration of massive planets forming far away from an inner planetary system. For this, we follow the dynamical evolution of the orbital elements of a massive planet undergoing a dissipative process with a gas disc…
We present a theoretical analysis of the optical light curves (LCs) for short-period high-mass transiting extrasolar planet systems. Our method considers the primary transit, the secondary eclipse, and the overall phase shape of the LC…
We present and discuss five candidate exoplanetary systems identified with the Kepler spacecraft. These five systems show transits from multiple exoplanet candidates. Should these objects prove to be planetary in nature, then these five…
Orbits of known extrasolar planets that are located outside the tidal circularization regions of their parent stars are often substantially eccentric. By contrast, planetary orbits in our Solar System are approximately circular, reflecting…
The Kepler mission has recently discovered a number of exoplanetary systems, such as Kepler-11 and Kepler-32, in which ensembles of several planets are found in very closely packed orbits (often within a few percent of an AU of one…