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The recent characterization of transiting close-in planets has revealed an intriguing population of sub-Neptunes with highly tilted and even polar orbits relative to their host star's equator. Any viable theory for the origin of these…
The ubiquity of planets and diversity of planetary systems reveal planet formation encompass many complex and competing processes. In this series of papers, we develop and upgrade a population synthesis model as a tool to identify the…
Context: Seasonal variations and climate stability of a planet are very sensitive to the planet obliquity and its evolution. This is of particular interest for the emergence and sustainability of land-based life, but orbital and rotational…
The modestly eccentric and non-coplanar orbits of the giant planets pose a challenge to solar system formation theories which generally indicate that the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk in nearly perfectly circular and…
We present new ways to identify single and multiple moons around extrasolar planets using planetary transit timing variations (TTVs) and transit duration variations (TDVs). For planets with one moon, measurements from successive transits…
High levels of dust have been detected in the immediate vicinity of many stars, both young and old. A promising scenario to explain the presence of this short-lived dust is that these analogues to the Zodiacal cloud (or exozodis) are…
Theories of planet formation predict the birth of giant planets in the inner, dense, and gas-rich regions of the circumstellar disks around young stars. These are the regions from which strong CO emission is expected. Observations have so…
Being one of the most fundamental physical parameter of astronomical objects, mass plays a vital role in the study of exoplanets, including their temperature structure, chemical composition, formation, and evolution. However, nearly a…
Aims: Stellar activity may complicate the analysis of high-precision radial-velocity spectroscopic data when looking for exoplanets signatures. We aim at quantifying the impact of stellar spots on stars with various spectral types and…
As next-generation imaging instruments and interferometers search for planets closer to their stars, they must contend with increasing orbital motion and longer integration times. These compounding effects make it difficult to detect faint…
Orbital evolution is a critical process that sculpts planetary systems, particularly during their early stages where planet-disk interactions are expected to lead to the formation of resonant chains. Despite the theoretically expected…
Satellites around substellar companions are a heterogeneous class of objects with a variety of different formation histories. Focusing on potentially detectable satellites around exoplanets and brown dwarfs, we might expect to find objects…
Co-orbital exoplanets are a by-product of the models of formation of planetary systems. However, none have been detected in nature thus far. Although challenging, the observation of co-orbital exoplanets would provide valuable information…
We explored two aspects of the problem of characterizing cool extrasolar giant planets in scattered optical light with a space based coronagraph. First, for a number of the known radial velocity (RV) giants we computed traditional forward…
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…
Exoplanet discoveries have motivated numerous efforts to find unseen populations of exomoons, yet they have been unsuccessful. A plausible explanation is that most discovered planets are located on close-in orbits, which would make their…
With dedicated exoplanet surveys underway for multiple extreme precision radial velocity (EPRV) instruments, the near-future prospects of RV exoplanet science are promising. These surveys' generous time allocations are expected to…
Planet formation simulations consistently predict compact systems of numerous small planets in chains of mean motion resonances formed by planet-disk interaction, but transiting planet surveys have found most systems to be non-resonant and…
The long-term stability of the evolution of two-planet systems is considered by using the general three body problem (GTBP). Our study is focused on the stability of systems with adjacent orbits when at least one of them is highly…
We have been monitoring 373 very bright (V < 6 mag) G and K giants with high precision optical Doppler spectroscopy for more than a decade at Lick Observatory. Our goal was to discover planetary companions around those stars and to better…