Related papers: Architectures of Planetary Systems and Implication…
In the blooming field of exoplanetary science, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets. Kepler's very precise and long-duration photometry is ideal for detecting planetary transits around Sun-like…
The most puzzling property of the extrasolar planets discovered by recent radial velocity surveys is their high orbital eccentricities, which are very difficult to explain within our current theoretical paradigm for planet formation.…
Astronomers have discovered that both planets and binaries are abundant throughout the Galaxy. In combination, we know of over 100 planets in binary and higher-order multi-star systems, in both circumbinary and circumstellar configurations.…
All circumbinary planets currently detected are in orbits that are almost coplanar to the binary orbit. While misaligned circumbinary planets are more difficult to detect, observations of polar aligned circumbinary gas and debris disks…
Recent radial velocity and transit data discovered $\sim 100$ planets in binary or triple stellar systems out of the entire population of a few thousand known planets. Stellar companions are expected to strongly influence both the formation…
The information gathered from observing planetary systems is not limited to the discovery of planets, but also includes the observational upper limits constraining the presence of any additional planets. Incorporating these upper limits…
We recommend an intensive effort to survey and understand the obliquity distribution of small close-in extrasolar planets over the coming decade. The orbital obliquities of exoplanets--i.e., the relative orientation between the planetary…
The Kepler mission and its successor K2 have brought forth a cascade of transiting planets. Many of these planetary systems exhibit multiple members, but a large fraction possess only a single transiting example. This overabundance of…
Transit timing variations (TTVs) can provide useful information for systems observed by transit, as they allow us to put constraints on the masses and eccentricities of the observed planets, or even to constrain the existence of…
Context. The presence of a stellar companion can strongly influence the architecture and long-term stability of planetary systems. Motivated by the discovery of exoplanets exhibiting extremely high eccentricities (e >= 0.8) in systems with…
A large population of planetary candidates in short-period orbits have been found through transit searches. Radial velocity surveys have also revealed several Jupiter-mass planets with highly eccentric orbits. Measurements of the…
The Solar System includes two planets --- Mercury and Mars --- significantly less massive than Earth, and all evidence indicates that planets of similar size orbit many stars. In fact, one of the first exoplanets to be discovered is a…
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…
Over 300 extrasolar planets have been found since 1992, showing that planetary systems are common and exhibit an outstanding variety of characteristics. As the number of detections grows and as models of planet formation progress to account…
Planet formation occurs around a wide range of stellar masses and stellar system architectures. An improved understanding of the formation process can be achieved by studying it across the full parameter space, particularly toward the…
Characterization of transiting planets with transit timing variations (TTVs) requires understanding how to translate the observed TTVs into masses and orbital elements of the planets. This can be challenging in multi-planet transiting…
NASA's Kepler mission has discovered thousands of planetary systems, ~20% of which are found to host multiple transiting planets. This relative paucity (compared to the high fraction of single transiting systems) is postulated to result…
Kepler-51 is a $\lesssim 1\,\mathrm{Gyr}$-old Sun-like star hosting three transiting planets with radii $\approx 6$-$9\,R_\oplus$ and orbital periods $\approx 45$-$130\,\mathrm{days}$. Transit timing variations (TTVs) measured with past…
We develop an analytic model for transit timing variations produced by orbital conjunctions between gravitationally interacting planets. If the planetary orbits have tight orbital spacing, which is a common case among the Kepler planets,…
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…