Related papers: Observed Properties of Extrasolar Planets
Exoplanets, short for `extra solar planets', are planets outside our solar system. They are objects with masses less than around 15 Jupiter-masses that orbit stars other than the Sun. They are small enough so they can not burn deuterium in…
In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…
The Solar System hosts the most studied and best understood major and minor planetary bodies - and the only extraterrestrial bodies to have been visited by spacecraft. The Solar System therefore provides important constraints on both the…
The sample of known exoplanets is strongly biased to masses larger than the ones of the giant gaseous planets of the solar system. Recently, the discovery of two extrasolar planets of considerably lower masses around the nearby stars GJ 436…
Numerous telescopes and techniques have been used to find and study extrasolar planets, but none has been more successful than NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler has discovered the majority of known exoplanets, the smallest planets to…
Terrestrial planetary systems may exist around nearby stars as the Earth-sized counterparts to the many giant planets already discovered within the solar neighborhood. In this chapter we first discuss the numerous techniques which have been…
The Capture Theory gives planet production through a tidal interaction between a condensed star and a diffuse protostar within a dense embedded cluster. Initial extensive and highly eccentric planetary orbits round-off and decay in a…
Most observed extrasolar planets have masses similar to, but orbits very different from, the gas giants of our solar system. Many are much closer to their parent stars than would have been expected and their orbits are often rather…
The discovery of over 200 extrasolar planets with the radial velocity (RV) technique has revealed that many giant planets have large eccentricities, in striking contrast with most of the planets in the solar system and prior theories of…
Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…
The number of extrasolar planets discovered is increasing, so that more than five thousand exoplanets have been confirmed to date. Now we have an opportunity to test the validity of the laws governing planetary systems and take steps to…
The discovery of now about 20 extrasolar planets orbiting solar-type stars with properties quite different from those in our Solar System has raised many questions about the formation and evolution of planets. The tidal interaction between…
With over 1800 planets discovered outside of the Solar System in the past two decades, the field of exoplanetology has broadened our perspective on planetary systems. Research priorities are now moving from planet detection to planet…
The field of exoplanetary science has experienced a recent surge of new systems that is largely due to the precision photometry provided by the Kepler mission. The latest discoveries have included compact planetary systems in which the…
The known population of exoplanets exhibits a much wider range of orbital eccentricities than Solar System planets and has a much higher average eccentricity. These facts have been widely interpreted to indicate that the Solar System is an…
There are two planetary formation scenarios: core accretion and gravitational disk instability. Based on the fact that gaseous objects are preferentially observed around metal-rich host stars, most extra-solar gaseous objects discovered to…
We update our analysis of recent exoplanet data that gives us a partial answer to the question: How does our Solar System compare to the other planetary systems in the Universe? Exoplanets detected between January and August 2002 strengthen…
With the high number of extrasolar planets discovered by now, it becomes possible to constrain theoretical formation models in a statistical sense. This paper is the first in a series in which we carry out a large number of planet…
The vast majority of known extrasolar planets orbit stars with a narrow range of masses (0.7-1.3 M_sun). Recent years have seen rapid growth in our knowledge about the properties of planetary systems with host stars significantly more…
The orbital parameters of the observed extrasolar planets differ strongly from those of our own solar system. The differences include planets with high masses, small semi-major axis and large eccentricities. We performed numerical…