Related papers: Forever alone? Testing single eccentric planetary …
From the numerous detected planets outside the Solar system, no terrestrial planet comparable to our Earth has been discovered so far. The search for an Exo-Earth is certainly a big challenge which may require the detections of planetary…
In radial velocity observations, a pair of extrasolar planets near a 2:1 orbital resonance can be misinterpreted as a single eccentric planet, if data are sparse and measurement precision insufficient to distinguish between these models. We…
The search for habitable exoplanets and life beyond the Solar System is one of the most compelling scientific opportunities of our time. Nevertheless, the high cost of building facilities that can address this topic and the keen public…
Exoplanets, or planets outside our own solar system, have long been of interest to astronomers; however, only in the past two decades have scientists had the technology to characterize and study planets so far away from us. With advanced…
Many observed giant planets lie on eccentric orbits. Such orbits could be the result of strong scatterings with other giant planets. The same dynamical instability that produces these scatterings may also cause habitable planets in interior…
Planets in extrasolar systems tend to interact such that their orbits lie near a boundary between apsidal libration and circulation, a "separatrix", with one eccentricity periodically reaching near-zero. One explanation, applied to the…
Planets are observed to orbit the component star(s) of stellar binary systems on so-called circumprimary or circumsecondary orbits, as well as around the entire binary system on so-called circumbinary orbits. Depending on the orbital…
The majority of stars form in star clusters and many are thought to have planetary companions. We demonstrate that multi-planet systems are prone to instabilities as a result of frequent stellar encounters in these star clusters much more…
A large proportion of transiting planetary systems appear to possess only a single planet as opposed to multiple transiting planets. This excess of singles is indicative of significant mutual inclinations existing within a large number of…
We use both the conventional and more recently developed methods of cluster analysis to study the data of extra-solar planets. Using the data set with planetary mass M, orbital period P, and orbital eccentricity e, we investigate the…
Three planets with minimum masses less than 10 Earth masses orbit the star HD 40307, suggesting these planets may be rocky. However, with only radial velocity data, it is impossible to determine if these planets are rocky or gaseous. Here…
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…
We present an approach that is able to both rapidly assess the dynamical stability of multiple planet systems, and determine whether an exoplanet system would be capable of hosting a dynamically stable Earth-mass companion in its habitable…
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…
We investigate the underlying distribution of orbital eccentricities for planets around early-to-mid M dwarf host stars. We employ a sample of 163 planets around early- to mid-M dwarfs across 101 systems detected by NASA's Kepler Mission.…
We explore the multiplicity of exoplanet host stars with high-resolution images obtained with VLT/SPHERE. Two different samples of systems were observed: one containing low-eccentricity outer planets, and the other containing…
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…
The majority of extrasolar planets discovered to date have significantly eccentric orbits, some if not all of which may have been produced through planetary migration. During this process, any planets interior to such an orbit would…
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…
We develop a phenomenological theory that aims to account for the origin of the large eccentricities of extrasolar planets and that of the small eccentricities in the solar system, the preference for apsidal alignment in non-resonant…