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Secular perturbations from binary stars and distant massive planets can drive cold planets onto nearly parabolic orbits with pericenter passages extremely close to their host stars. Meanwhile, short-period super-Earths are frequently…
In this talk, after briefly reviewing some historical remarks concerning strange stars, the achievements in physics and dynamical behavior of strange stars are discussed. Especially, various observational effects in distinguishing strange…
The tidal heating of hypothetical rocky (or terrestrial) extra-solar planets spans a wide range of values depending on stellar masses and initial orbits. Tidal heating may be sufficiently large (in many cases, in excess of radiogenic…
Many evidences exist for a connection between galaxy interactions and induced star formation. However, a large range of responses of galaxies to tidal interactions is found, both in observations and in numerical simulations. We will discuss…
The presence of giant planets influences potentially habitable worlds in numerous ways. Massive celestial neighbors can facilitate the formation of planetary cores and modify the influx of asteroids and comets towards Earth-analogs later…
Massive stars play a major role in the evolution of their host galaxies, and serve as important probes of the distant Universe. It has been established that the majority of massive stars reside in close binaries and will interact with their…
Planet--Planet scattering is an efficient and robust dynamical mechanism for producing eccentric exoplanets. Coupled to tidal interactions with the central star, it can also explain close--in giant planets on circularized and potentially…
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…
Most of our current understanding of the planet formation mechanism is based on the planet metallicity correlation derived mostly from solar-type stars harbouring gas-giant planets. To achieve a far more reaching grasp on the substellar…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
Magnetic interactions between stars and close-in planets may lead to a detectable signal on the stellar disk. HD 189733 is one of the key exosystems thought to harbor magnetic interactions, which may have been detected in August 2013. We…
One of the predictions of high eccentricity planetary migration is that many planets will end up plunging into their host stars. We investigate the consequence of planetary mergers on their stellar hosts' spin-period. Energy and angular…
Large ground- and space-based telescopes will be able to observe Earth-like planets in the near future. We explore how different planetary surfaces can strongly influence the climate, atmospheric composition, and remotely detectable spectra…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
One well-tested method in science is to separate the object of interest from its surroundings and look at it in isolation. The advantage is that unimportant information is removed and the true properties of the object are seen more clearly.…
Interacting galaxies favor the formation of star clusters but are also suspected to affect their evolution through an intense and rapidly varying tidal field. Treating this complex behaviour remains out-of-reach of (semi-)analytical…
Aims. The aim of this work is to study the dynamical effects of the Galaxy on binary star systems with physical and orbital charac- teristics similar to those of the population of known wide binary stars with exoplanets. As secondary goal…
We present a spectropolarimetric snapshot survey of solar-type planet hosting stars. In addition to 14 planet-hosting stars observed as part of the BCool magnetic snapshot survey, we obtained magnetic observations of a further 19…
The search for extrasolar Earth-like planets is underway. Over 100 extrasolar giant planets are known to orbit nearby sun-like stars, including several in multiple-planet systems. These planetary systems are stepping stones for the search…
We study how close-in systems such as those detected by Kepler are affected by the dynamics of bodies in the outer system. We consider two scenarios: outer systems of giant planets potentially unstable to planet--planet scattering, and wide…