Related papers: Planet-Planet Scattering Alone Cannot Explain the …
Gas giants orbiting interior to the ice line are thought to have been displaced from their formation locations by processes that remain debated. Here we uncover several new metallicity trends, which together may indicate that two competing…
The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation…
A major outstanding question regarding the formation of planetary systems is whether wide-orbit giant planets form differently than close-in giant planets. We aim to establish constraints on two key parameters that are relevant for…
Planet formation occurs around a wide range of stellar masses and stellar system architectures. An improved understanding of the formation process can be achieved by studying it across the full parameter space, particularly toward the…
Orbits of known extrasolar planets that are located outside the tidal circularization regions of their parent stars are often substantially eccentric. By contrast, planetary orbits in our Solar System are approximately circular, reflecting…
Main sequence stars are commonly surrounded by debris disks, formed by cold far-IR-emitting dust that is thought to be continuously replenished by a reservoir of undetected dust-producing planetesimals. We have investigated the orbital…
The transit method, during which a planet's presence is inferred by measuring the reduction in flux as it passes in front of its parent star, is a highly successful exoplanet detection and characterization technique. During transit, the…
The occurrence of planets in binary star systems has been investigated via a variety of techniques that sample a wide range of semi-major axes, but with a preponderance of such results applicable to planets with semi-major axes less than a…
The planet candidates discovered by the Kepler mission provide a rich sample to constrain the architectures and relative inclinations of planetary systems within approximately 0.5 AU of their host stars. We use the triple-transit systems…
With the discovery of now more than 500 exoplanets, we present a statistical analysis of the planetary orbital periods and their relationship to the rotation periods of their parent stars. We test whether the structure of planetary orbits,…
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered thousands of planetary systems, ~20% of which are found to host multiple transiting planets. This relative paucity (compared to the high fraction of single transiting systems) is postulated to result…
Although current sensitivity limits are such that true Solar System analogs remain challenging to detect, numerous planetary systems have been discovered that are very different from our own Solar System. The majority of systems harbor a…
The discovery of planets around massive stars is important for understanding how planet formation and evolution is conditioned by different stellar environments. However, current planetary search surveys have failed to detect planets around…
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…
The majority of binary star systems that host exoplanets will spend the first portion of their lives within a star-forming cluster that may drive dynamical evolution of the binary-planet system. We perform numerical simulations of S-type…
We investigate formation of close-in terrestrial planets from planetary embryos under the influence of a hot Jupiter (HJ) using gravitational N-body simulations that include gravitational interactions between the gas disk and the…
Nearly half of the exoplanets found within binary star systems reside in very wide binaries with average stellar separations beyond 1,000 AU (1 AU being the Earth-Sun distance), yet the influence of such distant binary companions on…
Free-floating planets comprise one of the most enigmatic populations of exoplanets in the Galaxy. Though ground-based observations point to a large abundance of these worlds, little is known about their origins and demographics. In the…
The hundreds of multiple planetary systems discovered by the \textit{Kepler} mission are typically observed to reside in close-in ($\lesssim0.5$ AU), low-eccentricity, and low-inclination orbits. We run N-body experiments to study the…
Stars and planets are the fundamental objects of the Universe. Their formation processes, though related, may differ in important ways. Stars almost certainly form from gravitational collapse and probably have formed this way since the…