Related papers: The Great Escape II: Exoplanet Ejection from Dying…
For centuries, our knowledge of planetary systems and ideas about planet formation were based on a single example, our solar system. During the last thirteen years, the discovery of ~170 planetary systems has ushered in a new era for…
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…
In the last few years, a number of planets have been proposed to orbit several post main-sequence binary star systems on the basis of observed variations in the timing of eclipses between the binary components. A common feature of these…
The discovery of Exoplanetary Systems has challenged some of the theories of planet formation, which assume unperturbed evolution of the host star and its planets. However, in star clusters the interactions with flyby stars and binaries may…
Planets around binary stars and those in multiplanet systems may experience resonant eccentricity excitation and disruption due to perturbations from a distant stellar companion. This "evection resonance" occurs when the apsidal precession…
A planet orbiting around a star in a binary system can be ejected if it lies too far from its host star. We find that instability boundaries first obtained in numerical studies can be explained by overlap between sub-resonances within…
Most stars with birth masses larger than that of our Sun belong to binary or higher order multiple systems. Similarly, most stars have stellar winds. Radiation pressure and multiplicity create outflows of material that remove mass from the…
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…
Multiple studies have shown that planet-planet scattering plays an important role in the dynamical evolution of planetary systems. For instance, it has been shown that planet-planet scattering can reproduce the eccentricity distribution of…
Recent gravitational microlensing observations predict a vast population of free-floating giant planets that outnumbers main sequence stars almost twofold. A frequently-invoked mechanism for generating this population is a dynamical…
Observations from optical to centimeter wavelengths have demonstrated that multiple systems of two or more bodies is the norm at all stellar evolutionary stages. Multiple systems are widely agreed to result from the collapse and…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between multiple giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities seem…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
Earth-sized planets were observed in close-in orbits around M dwarfs. While more and more planets are expected to be uncovered around M dwarfs, theories of their formation and dynamical evolution are still in their infancy. We investigate…
(Abridged) In planetary systems with two or more giant planets, dynamical instabilities can lead to collisions or ejections through strong planet--planet scattering. Previous studies for simple initial configurations with two equal-mass…
Extrasolar multiple-planet systems provide valuable opportunities for testing theories of planet formation and evolution. The architectures of the known multiple-planet systems demonstrate a fascinating level of diversity, which motivates…
Our improving understanding of the life cycle of planetary systems prompts investigations of the role of the Galactic environment before, during and after Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stellar evolution. Here, we investigate the interplay…
We investigate the evolution, following gas dispersal, of a star cluster produced from a hydrodynamical calculation. We find that when the gas, initially comprising 60% of the mass, is removed, the system settles into a bound cluster…
In the coming years, high contrast imaging surveys are expected to reveal the characteristics of the population of wide-orbit, massive, exoplanets. To date, a handful of wide planetary mass companions are known, but only one such…
In this paper, the evolution of exoplanet orbits at the late stages of stellar evolution is studied by the method of population synthesis. The evolution of stars is traced from the Main Sequence stage to the white dwarf stage. The MESA…