Related papers: Flow of Planets Raises Short Period Fall Off
In order to gain a better understanding of planet formation and evolution, it is important to examine the statistics of exoplanets in the Galactic context. By combining information on stellar elemental abundances and kinematics, we…
The 4.2-day orbit of the newly discovered planet around 51~Pegasi is formally unstable to tidal dissipation. However, the orbital decay time in this system is longer than the main-sequence lifetime of the central star. Given our best…
The Kepler Mission has discovered thousands of exoplanets and revolutionized our understanding of their population. This large, homogeneous catalog of discoveries has enabled rigorous studies of the occurrence rate of exoplanets and…
The easiest exoplanets to detect are those that orbit very close to their hoststars. As a result, even though these planets are quite rare, they represent amajor fraction of the current exoplanet population. A side-effect of theproximity…
Most transiting planets orbit very close to their parent star, causing strong tidal forces between the two bodies. Tidal interaction can modify the dynamics of the system through orbital alignment, circularisation, synchronisation, and…
The tidal evolution of hot Jupiters may change the efficiency of transit surveys of stellar clusters. The orbital decay that hot Jupiters suffer may result in their destruction, leaving fewer transiting planets in older clusters. We…
The giant planet occurrence rate rises with orbital period out to at least $\sim$300 days. Large-scale planetary migration through the disk has long been suspected to be the physical origin of this feature, as the timescale of standard Type…
At least 10-15% of nearby sun-like stars have known Jupiter-mass planets. In contrast, very few planets are found in mature open and globular clusters such as the Hyades and 47 Tuc. We explore here the possibility that this dichotomy is due…
From wispy gas giants on the verge of disruption to tiny rocky bodies already falling apart, short-period exoplanets pose a severe puzzle to theories of planet formation and orbital evolution. By far most of the planets known beyond the…
Asynchronous rotation and orbital eccentricity lead to time-dependent irradiation of the close-in gas giant exoplanets -- the hot Jupiters. This time-dependent surface heating gives rise to fluid motions which propagate throughout the…
Recent studies claimed that planets around the same star have similar sizes and masses and regular spacings, and that planet pairs usually show ordered sizes such that the outer planet is usually the larger one. Here I show that these…
Tidal dissipation in planetary interiors is one of the key physical mechanisms that drive the evolution of star-planet and planet-moon systems. Tidal dissipation in planets is intrinsically related to their internal structure. In…
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…
Approximately half of the planets discovered by NASA's Kepler mission are in systems where just a single planet transits its host star, and the remaining planets are observed to be in multi-planet systems. Recent analyses have reported a…
Strong tidal interaction with the central star can circularize the orbits of close-in planets. With the standard tidal quality factor Q of our solar system, estimated circularization times for close-in extrasolar planets are typically…
The population of giant planets on short-period orbits can potentially be explained by some flavours of high-eccentricity migration. In this paper we investigate one such mechanism involving "secular chaos", in which secular interactions…
We show that stars with transiting planets for which the stellar obliquity is large are preferentially hot (T_eff > 6250 K). This could explain why small obliquities were observed in the earliest measurements, which focused on relatively…
Small, rocky planets have been found orbiting in extreme proximity to their host stars, sometimes down to only $\sim 2$ stellar radii. These ultra-short-period planets (USPs) likely did not form in their present-day orbits, but rather…
Planets with several Earth masses and a few day orbital periods have been discovered through radial velocity and transit surveys. Regardless of their formation mechanism, a key evolution issue is the efficiency of their retention near their…
Analyses of exoplanet statistics suggest a trend of giant planet occurrence with host star mass, a clue to how planets like Jupiter form. One missing piece of the puzzle is the occurrence around late K dwarf stars (masses of 0.5-0.75Msun…