Related papers: Kepler's Missing Planets
We assess the multi-planet systems discovered by the Kepler satellite in terms of current ideas about orbital migration and eccentricity damping due to planet-disk interactions. Our primary focus is on mean motion resonances. Only a few…
We report on a possible correlation between the masses and periods of the extrasolar planets, manifested as a paucity of massive planets with short orbital periods. Monte-Carlo simulations show the effect is significant, and is not solely…
TESS and Kepler have revealed that practically all close-in sub-Neptunes form in mean-motion resonant chains, most of which unravel on timescales of 100 Myr. Using N-body integrations, we study how planetary collisions from destabilized…
The transits of a planet on a Keplerian orbit occur at time intervals exactly equal to the period of the orbit. If a second planet is introduced the orbit is not Keplerian and the transits are no longer exactly periodic. We compute the…
After finding more planets than expected at the shortest period, there has been an effort to explain their numbers by weak tidal friction. However, we find that the strength of tidal dissipation that would produce the occurence distribution…
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…
Employing the data from orbital periods and masses of extra-solar planets in 166 multiple planetary systems, the period-ratio and mass-ratio of adjacent planet pairs are studied. The correlation between the period-ratio and mass-ratio is…
We present a study of the relative sizes of planets within the multiple candidate systems discovered with the $Kepler$ mission. We have compared the size of each planet to the size of every other planet within a given planetary system after…
High-multiplicity Kepler systems (referred to as Kepler multis) are often tightly packed and may be on the verge of instability. Many systems of this type could have experienced past instabilities, where the compact orbits and often low…
To improve our understanding of orbital instabilities in compact planetary systems, we compare suites of $N$-body simulations against numerical integrations of simplified dynamical models. We show that, surprisingly, dynamical models that…
Almost half of the stellar systems in the solar neighborhood are made up of multiple stars. In multiple-star systems, planet formation is under the dynamical influence of stellar companions, and the planet occurrence rate is expected to be…
A considerable fraction of multi-planet systems discovered by the observational surveys of extrasolar planets reside in mild proximity to first-order mean motion resonances. However, the relative remoteness of such systems from nominal…
We suggest the existence of a correlation between the planetary radius and orbital period for planets with radii smaller than 4 R_Earth. Using the Kepler data, we find a correlation coefficient of 0.5120, and suggest that the correlation is…
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 an era when we are charting multiple planets per system, one might wonder the extent to which "missing" (or failing to detect) a planet can skew our interpretation of the system architecture. We address this question with a simple…
We analyze data from the Quarter 1-17 Data Release 24 (Q1--Q17 DR24) planet candidate catalog from NASA's Kepler mission, specifically comparing systems with single transiting planets to systems with multiple transiting planets, and…
Surveys have revealed many multi-planet systems containing super-Earths and Neptunes in orbits of a few days to a few months. There is debate whether in situ assembly or inward migration is the dominant mechanism of the formation of such…
Doppler planet searches have discovered that giant planets follow orbits with a wide range of orbital eccentricities, revolutionizing theories of planet formation. The discovery of hundreds of exoplanet candidates by NASA's Kepler mission…
Kepler will monitor enough stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the Kepler photometry of such transits with precise radial velocity (RV)…
We present a statistical analysis that demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Kepler candidate multiple transiting systems (multis) indeed represent true, physically-associated transiting planets. Binary stars provide the primary…