Related papers: Can planetary instability explain the Kepler dicho…
The Kepler mission has recently discovered a number of exoplanetary systems, such as Kepler-11 and Kepler-32, in which ensembles of several planets are found in very closely packed orbits (often within a few percent of an AU of one…
The Kepler-11 star hosts at least six transiting super-Earth planets detected through the precise photometric observations of the Kepler mission (Lissauer et al.). In this paper, we re-analyze the available Kepler data, using the direct…
The Kepler planet candidates are an interesting testbed for planet formation scenarios. We present results from N-body simulations of multi-planetary systems that resemble those observed by Kepler. We add both smooth (Type I/II) and…
Before the launch of the Kepler Space Telescope, models of low-mass planet formation predicted that convergent Type I migration would often produce systems of low-mass planets in low-order mean-motion resonances. Instead, Kepler discovered…
(Abridged) Inspired by the Kepler planet discoveries, we consider the thermal contraction of planets close to their parent star, under the influence of evaporation. The mass-loss rates are based on hydrodynamic models of evaporation that…
For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…
The stellar obliquity of a transiting planetary system can be constrained by combining measurements of the star's rotation period, radius, and projected rotational velocity. Here we present a hierarchical Bayesian technique for recovering…
At least 30\% of main sequence stars host planets with sizes of between 1 and 4 Earth radii and orbital periods of less than 100 days. We use N-body simulations including a model for gas-assisted pebble accretion and disk--planet tidal…
We confirm 27 planets in 13 planetary systems by showing the existence of statistically significant anti-correlated transit timing variations (TTVs), which demonstrates that the planet candidates are in the same system, and long-term…
Recent observational campaigns have shown that multi-planet systems seem to be abundant in our Galaxy. Moreover, it seems that these systems might have distant companions, either planets, brown-dwarfs or other stellar objects. These…
We constrain the intrinsic architecture of Kepler planetary systems by modeling the observed multiplicities of the transiting planets (tranets) and their transit timing variations (TTVs). We robustly determine that the fraction of Sun-like…
Trends in the planet population with host star mass provide an avenue to constrain planet formation theories. We derive the planet radius distribution function for Kepler stars of different spectral types, sampling a range in host star…
Characterizing the dependence of the orbital architectures and formation environments on the eccentricity distribution of planets is vital for understanding planet formation. In this work, we perform statistical eccentricity studies of…
We present a Monte Carlo model for the structure of low mass (total mass < 25 earth mass) planetary systems that form by the in situ gravitational assembly of planetary embryos into final planets. Our model includes distributions of mass,…
The Kepler mission is dramatically increasing the number of planets known in multi-planetary systems. Many adjacent planets have orbital period ratios near resonant values, with a tendency to be larger than required for exact first-order…
(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…
The rapid growth in the number of known exoplanets has revealed the existence of several distinct planetary populations in the observed mass-period diagram. Two of the most surprising are, (1) the concentration of gas giants around 1AU and…
The Kepler mission enabled us to look at the intrinsic population of exoplanets within our galaxy. In period-radius space, the distribution of the intrinsic population of planets contains structure that can trace planet formation and…
The Kepler high-precision planetary sample has revealed a radius valley, separating compact super-Earths from sub-Neptunes with lower density. Super-Earths are generally assumed to be rocky planets that were probably born in-situ, while 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 is the host of…