Related papers: Exoplanetary Geophysics -- An Emerging Discipline

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…

We know that giant planets played a crucial role in the making of our Solar System. The discovery of giant planets orbiting other stars is a formidable opportunity to learn more about these objects, what is their composition, how various…

Most detected transiting planets have orbits which would fit within the one of Mercury, exposing them to intense stellar irradiation and interactions that significantly alter their properties. In contrast, colder planets with longer orbital…

The discovery of planets orbiting stars other than the Sun has accelerated over the past decade, and this trend will continue as new space- and ground-based observatories employ next-generation instrumentation to search the skies for…

For centuries, our knowledge of planetary systems and ideas about planet formation were based on a single example, our solar system. During the last thirteen years, the discovery of ~170 planetary systems has ushered in a new era for…

Exoplanetary science is on the verge of an unprecedented revolution. The thousands of exoplanets discovered over the past decade have most recently been supplemented by discoveries of potentially habitable planets around nearby low-mass…

In the near future there will be launched space missions (e.g. COROT, KEPLER), designed to detect Earth-like extrasolar planets. The orbital elements of these (still hypothetic) planets will contain some uncertainties, that can only be…

Astrophysical research into exoplanets has delivered thousands of confirmed planets orbiting distant stars. These planets span a wide ranges of size and composition, with diversity also being the hallmark of system configurations, the great…

Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…

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…

For centuries, humanity wondered if there were other worlds like ours in the Universe. For about a quarter of a century, we have known that planetary systems exist around other stars, and more than 3800 exoplanetary systems have been…

Low-mass planets have an extraordinarily diverse range of bulk compositions, from primarily rocky worlds to those with deep gaseous atmospheres. As techniques for measuring the masses of exoplanets are advancing the field towards the…

The search for extrasolar planets has developed rapidly and, today, more than 1700 planets have been found orbiting stars. Thanks to Gaia, we will collect high-accuracy astrometric orbits of thousands of new low-mass celestial objects, such…

I present a review of astrometric techniques and instrumentation utilized to search for, detect, and characterize extra-solar planets. First, I briefly summarize the properties of the present-day sample of extrasolar planets, in connection…

Giant planets dominate the mass of many planetary systems, including the Solar System, and represent the best-characterized class of extrasolar planets. Understanding the formation of giant planets bridges the high mass end of the planet…

The ancestor philosophers' dream of thousands of new worlds is finally realised: about 3500 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the neighborhood of our Sun. Most of them are very different from those we used to know in our Solar…

The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation…

Extrasolar planetary systems range from hot Jupiters out to icy comet belts more distant than Pluto. We explain this diversity in a model where the mass of solids in the primordial circumstellar disk dictates the outcome. The star retains…

Transiting extrasolar planets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation of planets as well as their internal structure. The existence of a secondary eclipse enables further study of the thermal properties of the the planet by…

With the availability of considerably more data, we revisit the question of how special our Solar System is, compared to observed exoplanetary systems. To this goal, we employ a mathematical transformation that allows for a meaningful,…