Related papers: Secular Chaos and the Production of Hot Jupiters
The discovery of Jupiter-mass planets in close orbits about their parent stars has challenged models of planet formation. Recent observations have shown that a number of these planets have highly inclined, sometimes retrograde orbits about…
The obliquity of a star, or the angle between its spin axis and the average orbit normal of its companion planets, provides a unique constraint on that system's evolutionary history. Unlike the Solar System, where the Sun's equator is…
Many exoplanetary systems containing hot Jupiters are found to possess significant misalignment between the spin axis of the host star and the planet's orbital angular momentum axis. A possible channel for producing such misaligned hot…
Exoplanet surveys have confirmed one of humanity's (and all teenagers') worst fears: we are weird. If our Solar System were observed with present-day Earth technology -- to put our system and exoplanets on the same footing -- Jupiter is the…
Although warm jupiters are generally too far from their stars for tides to be important, the presence of an inner planetary companion to a warm jupiter can result in tidal evolution of the system. Insight into the process and its effects…
The large eccentricities of cold Jupiters and the existence of hot Jupiters have long challenged theories of planet formation. A proposed solution to both of these puzzles is high-eccentricity migration, in which an initially cold Jupiter…
We describe the long-term evolution of compact systems of terrestrial planets, using a set of simulations that match the statistical properties of the observed exoplanet distribution. The evolution is driven by tidal dissipation in the…
Using numerical simulations, we show that smooth migration of the giant planets through a planetesimal disk leads to an orbital architecture that is inconsistent with the current one: the resulting eccentricities and inclinations of their…
The existence of giant extrasolar planets on short-period orbits ("hot Jupiters") challenges planet formation theories because such planets are difficult to form close to the star. High-eccentricity migration is a leading explanation, in…
Recent studies have proposed that most warm Jupiters (WJs, giant planets with semi-major axes in the range of 0.1-1 AU) probably form in-situ, or arrive in their observed orbits through disk migration. However, both in-situ formation and…
Explaining the origin and evolution of exoplanetary "hot Jupiters" remains a significant challenge. One possible mechanism for their production is planet-planet interactions, which produces hot Jupiters from planets born far from their host…
We examine how the late divergent migration of Jupiter and Saturn may have perturbed the terrestrial planets. We identify six secular resonances between the nu_5 apsidal eigenfrequency of Jupiter and Saturn and the four eigenfrequencies of…
A new mechanism is proposed to account for the formation of retrograde hot Jupiter in coplanar star-planet system via close encounter between a Jupiter mass planet and a brown dwarf mass planet. After long timescale scattering between…
High-eccentricity migration is a likely formation mechanism for many observed hot Jupiters, particularly those with a large misalignment between the stellar spin axis and orbital angular momentum axis of the planet. In one version of…
We explore the role of dynamics in shaping planetary system multiplicities, focussing on two particular problems. (1) We propose that the lack of close-in super-Earths in hot Jupiter systems is a signature of the migration history of the…
The dynamical structure of the Solar System can be explained by a period of orbital instability experienced by the giant planets. While a late instability was originally proposed to explain the Late Heavy Bombardment, recent work favors an…
In a multi-planet system, a gradual change in one planet's semi-major axis will affect the eccentricities of all the planets, as angular momentum is distributed via secular interactions. If tidal dissipation in the planet is the cause of…
The turbulent environment from which stars form may lead to misalignment between the stellar spin and the remnant protoplanetary disk. By using hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic simulations, we demonstrate that a wide range of stellar…
Recent analyses of Kepler space telescope data reveal that transiting planets with orbital periods shorter than about 2-3 days are generally observed around late-type stars with rotation periods longer than about 5-10 days. We investigate…
Exoplanets show a pile-up of Jupiter-size planets in orbits with a 3-day period. A fraction of these hot Jupiters have retrograde orbits with respect to the parent star's rotation. To explain these observations we performed a series of…