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The habitability of planets in binary star systems depends not only on the radiation environment created by the two stars, but also on the perturbations to planetary orbits and rotation produced by the gravitational field of the binary and…
Snowball episodes are associated with increases in atmospheric oxygen and the complexity of life on Earth, and they may be essential for the development of complex life on exoplanets. Sustained, stable Snowball episodes require a Snowball…
Recent advances have enabled the discovery of a population of potentially Earth-like planets, yet their orbital eccentricity, which governs their climate and provides clues about their origin and dynamical history, is still largely…
Climate modeling has shown that tidally influenced terrestrial exoplanets, particularly those orbiting M-dwarfs, have unique atmospheric dynamics and surface conditions that may enhance their likelihood to host viable habitats. However,…
A wealth of Earth-sized exoplanets will be discovered in the coming years, proving a large pool of candidates from which the targets for the search for life beyond the Solar system will be chosen. The target selection process will require…
We explore the impact of obliquity variations on planetary habitability in hypothetical systems with high mutual inclination. We show that large amplitude, high frequency obliquity oscillations on Earth-like exoplanets can suppress the…
The insolation a planet receives from its parent star is the main driver of the climate and depends on the planet's orbital configuration. Planets with non-zero obliquity and eccentricity experience seasonal insolation variations. As a…
Before about 500 million years ago, most probably our planet experienced temporary snowball conditions, with continental and sea ices covering a large fraction of its surface. This points to a potential bistability of Earth's climate, that…
For centuries, our knowledge of planetary systems and ideas about planet formation were based on a single example, our solar system. During the last thirteen years, the discovery of ~170 planetary systems has ushered in a new era for…
With more than 260 extrasolar planetary systems discovered to-date, the search for habitable planets has found new grounds. Unlike our solar system, the stars of many of these planets are hosts to eccentric or close-in giant bodies. Several…
The discovery of terrestrial exoplanets is uncovering increasingly diverse architectures. Of particular interest are those systems that contain exoplanets at a variety of star-planet separations, allowing direct comparison of exoplanet…
For a hypothetical planet on a highly eccentric orbit, we have calculated the osculating orbital parameters and its closest approaches to Earth and Moon over a period of 750 kyr. The approaches which are close enough to influence the…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between several giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities would…
A fundamental question in the study of planetary system demographics is: how common is the solar system architecture? The primary importance of this question lies in the potential of planetary systems to create habitable environments, and…
Most observed extrasolar planets have masses similar to, but orbits very different from, the gas giants of our solar system. Many are much closer to their parent stars than would have been expected and their orbits are often rather…
The apparent regularity of the motion of the giant planets of our solar system suggested for decades that said planets formed onto orbits similar to the current ones and that nothing dramatic ever happened during their lifetime. The…
(Abridged) In planetary systems with two or more giant planets, dynamical instabilities can lead to collisions or ejections through strong planet--planet scattering. Previous studies for simple initial configurations with two equal-mass…
The most puzzling property of the extrasolar planets discovered by recent radial velocity surveys is their high orbital eccentricities, which are very difficult to explain within our current theoretical paradigm for planet formation.…
The discovery of over 200 extrasolar planets with the radial velocity (RV) technique has revealed that many giant planets have large eccentricities, in striking contrast with most of the planets in the solar system and prior theories of…
The large eccentricities of many giant extrasolar planets may represent the endpoint of gravitational scattering in initially more crowded systems. If so, the early evolution of the giant planets is likely to be more restrictive of…