Related papers: Circumbinary planets - why they are so likely to t…
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.…
Since the discovery of the first exoplanets, those most adequate for life to begin and evolve have been sought. Due to observational bias, however, most of the discovered planets so far are gas giants, precluding their habitability.…
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 had managed to…
The presence of a body in an orbit around a close eclipsing binary star manifests itself through the light time effect influencing the observed times of eclipses as the close binary and the circumbinary companion both move around the common…
Strong tidal interaction with the central star can circularize the orbits of close-in planets. With the standard tidal quality factor Q of our solar system, estimated circularization times for close-in extrasolar planets are typically…
The dominant mechanism for generating free-floating planets has so far remained elusive. One suggested mechanism is that planets are ejected from planetary systems due to planet-planet interactions. However, instability around a single star…
All of the known circumbinary planets are large (> 3 Earth radii). Whilst observational biases may account for this dearth of small planets, in this paper we propose a theoretical explanation. Most of the known planets are near the…
Free-floating planets are a new class of planets recently discovered. These planets don't orbit within stellar systems, instead living a nomadic life within the galaxy. How such objects formed remains elusive. Numerous works have explored…
Over 50 circumbinary exoplanets have been discovered in recent years, with several of them being gas giants on wide orbits ($>10$AU). The aim of this work is to investigate whether these planets can form through circumbinary disc…
The occurrence of planets in binary star systems has been investigated via a variety of techniques that sample a wide range of semi-major axes, but with a preponderance of such results applicable to planets with semi-major axes less than a…
From simulations of transit observations, it is found that the detectability of extrasolar planets depends only on two parameters: The signal-to-noise ratio during a transit, and the number of data points observed during transits. All other…
In this letter we consider the evolution of a planetary system around a star inside a wide binary. We simulate numerically the evolution of the planetary orbits for both co-planar and highly-inclined systems. We find that the Kozai…
The primary difficulty with using transits to discover extrasolar planets is the low probability a planet has of transiting its parent star. One way of overcoming this difficulty is to search for transits in dense stellar fields, such as…
We explore test particle orbits in the orbital plane of eccentric stellar binary systems, searching for ``invariant loops'': closed curves that change shape periodically as a function of binary orbital phase as the test particles in them…
Ranked near the top of the long list of exciting discoveries made with NASA's Kepler photometer is the detection of transiting circumbinary planets. In just over a year the number of such planets went from zero to seven, including a…
We study orbital inclination changes associated with the precession of a disc-planet system that occurs through gravitational interaction with a binary companion on an inclined orbit. We investigate whether this scenario can account for…
Compact binaries with orbital periods shorter than about 7 days show an absence of transiting planets, a feature known as the ``circumbinary planet desert". The physical mechanism behind this desert remains unclear. We investigate its…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
Inspired by the recent Kepler discoveries of circumbinary planets orbiting nine close binary stars, we explore the fate of the former as the latter evolve off the main sequence. We combine binary star evolution models with dynamical…
Close, compact, hierarchical, multiple stellar systems, i.e., multiples having an outer orbital period from months to a few years, comprise a small, but continuously growing group of the triple and multiple star zoo. Many of them consist of…