Related papers: The Exoplanet Eccentricity Distribution from Keple…
Statistical analyses of large surveys for transiting planets such as the Kepler mission must account for systematic errors and biases. Transit detection depends not only on the planet's radius and orbital period, but also on host star…
The known extrasolar planets exhibit many interesting and surprising features--extremely short-period orbits, high-eccentricity orbits, mean-motion and secular resonances, etc.--and have dramatically expanded our appreciation of the…
We calculate and analyze the distribution of period ratios observed in systems of Kepler exoplanet candidates including studies of both adjacent planet pairs and all planet pairs. These distributions account for both the geometrical bias…
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…
The high eccentricities of the known extrasolar planets remain largely unexplained. We explore the possibility that eccentricities are excited in the outer parts of an extended planetary disk by encounters with stars passing at a few…
The Kepler Mission has detected dozens of compact planetary systems with more than four transiting planets. This sample provides a collection of close-packed planetary systems with relatively little spread in the inclination angles of the…
Prior to the 1990s, speculations about the occurrence of planets around other stars were based only on planet formation theory, observations of circumstellar disks, and the knowledge that at least one seemingly ordinary star had managed to…
In the blooming field of exoplanetary science, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets. Kepler's very precise and long-duration photometry is ideal for detecting planetary transits around Sun-like…
The determination of an exoplanet as rocky is critical for the assessment of planetary habitability. Observationally, the number of small-radius, transiting planets with accompanying mass measurements is insufficient for a robust…
The precise radial velocity technique is a cornerstone of exoplanetary astronomy. Astronomers measure Doppler shifts in the star's spectral features, which track the line-of/sight gravitational accelerations of a star caused by the planets…
We develop a general method to fit the planetary distribution function (PLDF) to exoplanet survey data. This maximum likelihood method accommodates more than one planet per star and any number of planet or target star properties.…
A fundamental question in the study of planetary system demographics is: how common is the solar system architecture? The primary importance of this question lies in the potential of planetary systems to create habitable environments, and…
Radial velocity (RV) surveys have discovered giant exoplanets on au-scale orbits with a broad distribution of eccentricities. Those with the most eccentric orbits are valuable laboratories for testing theories of high eccentricity…
Long-period transiting exoplanets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation and internal structure of extrasolar planets. Their studies grant insights into planetary evolution akin to the Solar System planets, which, in…
We analyze the transit timing variations obtained by the Kepler mission for 22 sub-jovian planet pairs (17 published, 5 new) that lie close to mean motion resonances. We find that the TTV phases for most of these pairs lie close to zero,…
Exoplanets, or planets outside our own solar system, have long been of interest to astronomers; however, only in the past two decades have scientists had the technology to characterize and study planets so far away from us. With advanced…
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…
We analyze 8 years of precise radial velocity measurements from the Keck Planet Search, characterizing the detection threshold, selection effects, and completeness of the survey. We carry out a systematic search for planets by assessing the…
Context. Giant planets play a major role in multiple planetary systems. Knowing their demographics is important to test their overall impact on planetary systems formation. It is also important to test their formation processes. Recently,…
We explore the possibility that the observed eccentricity distribution of extrasolar planets arose through planet-planet interactions, after the initial stage of planet formation was complete. Our results are based on ~3250 numerical…