Related papers: Dynamical evolution of planetary systems
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing of the giant planets, can be explained if planets radially migrated by exchanging orbital energy and momentum with outer disk planetesimals. Neptune's…
The study of our Solar System -- its formation, evolution, and long-term stability -- has been ongoing for centuries and is now a standard part of scientific education. While the formation of other Solar-like exoplanetary systems is…
Approximately half of the planets discovered by NASA's Kepler mission are in systems where just a single planet transits its host star, and the remaining planets are observed to be in multi-planet systems. Recent analyses have reported a…
Thousands of extrasolar planets have been discovered, and it is clear that the galactic planetary census draws on a diversity greatly exceeding that exhibited by the solar system's planets. We review significant landmarks in the chronology…
We develop an idealized dynamical model to predict the typical properties of outer extrasolar planetary systems, at radii beyond 5 AU. Our hypothesis is that dynamical evolution in outer planetary systems is controlled by a combination of…
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…
The extrasolar planets discovered to date possess unexpected orbital elements. Most orbit their host stars with larger eccentricities and smaller semi-major axes than similarly sized planets in our own solar system do. It is generally…
We show that stability of planetary systems is intimately connected with their internal order. An arbitrary initial distribution of planets is susceptible to catastrophic events in which planets either collide or are ejected from the…
Giant planets dominate the mass of many planetary systems, including the Solar System, and represent the best-characterized class of extrasolar planets. Understanding the formation of giant planets bridges the high mass end of the planet…
Doppler spectroscopy has detected 136 planets around nearby stars. A major puzzle is why their orbits are highly eccentric, while all planets in our Solar System are on nearly circular orbits, as expected if they formed by accretion…
Observations in the past decade have revealed extrasolar planets with a wide range of orbital semimajor axes and eccentricities. Based on the present understanding of planet formation via core accretion and oligarchic growth, we expect that…
Gas giant planets have been detected on eccentric orbits several hundreds of astronomical units in size around other stars. It has been proposed that even the Sun hosts a wide-orbit planet of 5-10 Earth masses, often called Planet Nine,…
More than 100 extrasolar planets have been discovered since 1990s. Different from the solar system, these planets' orbital eccentricities cover a huge range from 0 to 0.7. Incidently, the first Kuiper Belt Object was discovered in 1992.…
Extrasolar planets abound in almost any possible configuration. However, until five years ago, there was a lack of planets orbiting closer than 0.5 au to giant or subgiant stars. Since then, recent detections have started to populated this…
We update our analysis of recent exoplanet data that gives us a partial answer to the question: How does our Solar System compare to the other planetary systems in the Universe? Exoplanets detected between January and August 2002 strengthen…
Recent discoveries of extrasolar planets at small orbital radii, or with significant eccentricities, indicate that interactions between massive planets and the disks of gas and dust from which they formed are vital for determining the final…
Asteroid impacts with the Earth may have played an essential role in the emergence of life on Earth through their creation of favorable niches for life, changes to the atmosphere and delivery of water. Consequently, we suggest two potential…
Recent discoveries of strongly misaligned transiting exoplanets pose a challenge to the established planet formation theory which assumes planetary systems to form and evolve in isolation. However, the fact that the majority of stars…
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…
This paper studies the effects of dynamical interactions among the planets in observed extrasolar planetary systems, including hypothetical additional bodies, with a focus on secular perturbations. These interactions cause the…