Related papers: Bayesian priors for the eccentricity of transiting…

Our incomplete understanding of the formation of gas giants and of their mass-radius relationship has motivated ground-based, wide-field surveys for new transiting extrasolar giant planets. Yet, astrophysical false positives have dominated…

Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between multiple giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities seem…

Prior to the 1990s, speculations about the occurrence of planets around other stars were based only on planet formation theory, observations of circumstellar disks, and the knowledge that at least one seemingly ordinary star is the host of…

We extend the statistical analysis of Lissauer et al. (2012, ApJ 750, 112), which demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Kepler candidate multiple transiting systems (multis) represent true transiting planets, and develop therefrom…

The long-term habitability of Earth-like planets requires low orbital eccentricities. A secular perturbation from a distant stellar companion is a very important mechanism in exciting planetary eccentricities, as many of the extrasolar…

Radial velocity (RV) planet searches are increasingly finding planets with small velocity amplitudes, with long orbital periods, or in multiple planet systems. Bayesian inference has the potential to improve the interpretation of existing…

Kepler will monitor a sufficient number of stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the exquisite Kepler photometry of such transits with precise…

Research in extrasolar-planet science is data-driven. With the advent of radial-velocity instruments like HARPS and HARPS-N, and transit space missions like Kepler, our ability to discover and characterise extrasolar planets is no longer…

Optimization is widely used in statistics, and often efficiently delivers point estimates on useful spaces involving structural constraints or combinatorial structure. To quantify uncertainty, Gibbs posterior exponentiates the negative loss…

Transiting planet discoveries have yielded a plethora of information regarding the internal structure and atmospheres of extra-solar planets. These discoveries have been restricted to the low-periastron distance regime due to the bias…

The eccentricity of a planet's orbit and the inclination of its orbital plane encode important information about its formation and history. However, exoplanets detected via direct-imaging are often only observed over a very small fraction…

Transiting planets manifest themselves by a periodic dimming of their host star by a fixed amount. On the other hand, light curves of transiting circumbinary (CB) planets are expected to be neither periodic nor to have a single depth while…

We present results of a study on identifying circumbinary planet candidates that produce multiple transits during one conjunction with eclipsing binary systems. The occurrence of these transits enables us to estimate the candidates' orbital…

Based on the secular theory, we discuss the orbital evolution of stars in a nuclear star cluster to which a secondary massive black hole is infalling with vanishing eccentricity. We find that the eccentricities of the stars could show sharp…

Most giant exoplanets discovered by radial velocity surveys have much higher eccentricities than those in the solar system. The planet--planet scattering mechanism has been shown to match the broad eccentricity distribution, but the…

Since exoplanets were detected using the radial velocity method, they have revealed a diverse distribution of orbital configurations. Amongst these are planets in highly eccentric orbits (e > 0.5). Most of these systems consist of a single…

The velocity dispersion, or eccentricity distribution, of protoplanets interacting with planetesimals is set by a balance between dynamical friction and viscous stirring. We calculate analytically the eccentricity distribution function of…

The Kepler mission opened the door to a small but bonafide sample of circumbinary planets. Some initial trends have been identified and used to challenge our theories of planet and binary formation. However, the Kepler sample is not only…

The orbit eccentricities of the Solar System planets are unusually low compared to the average of known exoplanetary systems. A power law correlation has previously been found between the multiplicity of a planetary system and the orbital…

The expected distributions of eclipse-depth versus period for eclipsing binaries of different luminosities are derived from large-scale population synthesis experiments. Using the rapid Hurley et al. BSE binary evolution code, we have…