Related papers: On the naming convention used for multiple star sy…
Over the past two years, the search for low-mass extrasolar planets has led to the detection of seven so-called 'hot Neptunes' or 'super-Earths' around Sun-like stars. These planets have masses 5-20 times larger than the Earth and are…
Goal 1 of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Exoplanet Science Strategy is "to understand the formation and evolution of planetary systems as products of the process of star formation, and characterize and…
Terrestrial planetary systems may exist around nearby stars as the Earth-sized counterparts to the many giant planets already discovered within the solar neighborhood. In this chapter we first discuss the numerous techniques which have been…
The identification of mean motion resonances in exoplanetary systems or in the Solar System might be cumbersome when several planets and large number of smaller bodies are to be considered. Based on the geometrical meaning of the resonance…
The prospects for finding transiting exoplanets in the range of a few to 20 Earth masses is growing rapidly with both ground-based and spaced-based efforts. We describe a publicly available computer code to compute and quantify the…
Microlensing is a proven extrasolar planet search method that has already yielded the detection of four exoplanets. These detections have changed our understanding of planet formation ``beyond the snowline'' by demonstrating that…
The known population of exoplanets exhibits a much wider range of orbital eccentricities than Solar System planets and has a much higher average eccentricity. These facts have been widely interpreted to indicate that the Solar System is an…
To date, the ability for observers to reveal the composition or thermal structure of an exoplanet's atmosphere has rested on two techniques: high-contrast direct imaging and time-series observations of transiting exoplanets. The former is…
The current orbital geometries of exoplanet systems offer a fossilized record of the systems' dynamical histories. A particularly rich set of dynamical mechanisms is available to exoplanets residing in multi-star systems, which may have…
Given the tendency of planets to form in multiples, and the observational evidence in support of the existence of potential planet-hosting stars in binaries or clusters, it is expected that extrasolar terrestrial planes are more likely to…
Eclipsing binary systems form the fundamental basis of Astronomy in the sense that they are the primary means to determine fundamental stellar astrophysical quantities such as mass, radius, and temperature. Furthermore, they allow us to…
With over 5,000 exoplanets currently detected, there is a need for a primary classification method to prioritise candidates for biosignature observations. Here, we develop a classification method to categorise rocky exoplanets based on…
We review the field of exoplanetary biosignatures with a main focus upon atmospheric gas-phase species. Due to the paucity of data in Earth-like planetary atmospheres a common approach is to extrapolate knowledge from the Solar System and…
We analyze a sample of multiple-exoplanet systems which contain at least 3 transiting planets detected by the Kepler mission ("Kepler multiples"). We use a generalized Titius-Bode relation to predict the periods of 228 additional planets in…
Astronomers commonly quote the properties of celestial objects in units of parameters for the Sun, Jupiter, or the Earth. The resolution presented here was proposed by the IAU Inter-Division Working Group on Nominal Units for Stellar and…
All extra-solar planet masses that have been derived spectroscopically are lower limits since the inclination of the orbit to our line-of-sight is unknown except for transiting systems. It is, however, possible to determine the inclination…
Astronomical surveys have identified numerous exoplanets with bulk compositions that are unlike the planets of the Solar System, including rocky super-Earths and gas-enveloped sub-Neptunes. Observing the atmospheres of these objects…
The most successful method used so far to search for extrasolar planets is the radial velocity technique, where periodical shifts on the measured emission from a star provide evidence for an orbiting planet. This method has been used on…
We propose several descriptive measures to characterize the arrangements of planetary masses, periods, and mutual inclinations within exoplanetary systems. These measures are based in complexity theory and capture the global, system-level…
All circumbinary planets currently detected are in orbits that are almost coplanar to the binary orbit. While misaligned circumbinary planets are more difficult to detect, observations of polar aligned circumbinary gas and debris disks…