Related papers: Terrestrial planets across space and time

Terrestrial planets in the habitable zone around nearby stars are of great interest and provide a good sample for further characteristics of their habitability. In this paper, we collect a nearby star catalog within 20 pc according to the…

M dwarf stars are exciting targets for exoplanet investigations; however, their fundamental stellar properties are difficult to measure. Perhaps the most challenging property to measure is stellar age. Once on the main sequence, M dwarfs…

The terrestrial and gas-giant planets in our solar system may represent some prototypes for planets around other stars; the exoplanets because most stars have similar overall elemental abundances as our sun. The solar system planets…

A habitable zone of a star is defined as a range of orbits within which a rocky planet can support liquid water on its surface. The most intriguing question driving the search for habitable planets is whether they host life. But is the age…

Earth-scale planets in the classical habitable zone (HZ) are more likely to be habitable if they possess active geophysics. Without a constant internal energy source, planets cool as they age, eventually terminating tectonic activity and…

We reconsider the commonly held assumption that warm debris disks are tracers of terrestrial planet formation. The high occurrence rate inferred for Earth-mass planets around mature solar-type stars based on exoplanet surveys (roughly 20%)…

We characterize the occurrence rate of planets, ranging in size from 0.5-16 R$_\oplus$, orbiting FGK stars with orbital periods from 0.5-500 days. Our analysis is based on results from the "DR25" catalog of planet candidates produced by…

This paper reviews our current understanding of terrestrial planets formation. The focus is on computer simulations of the dynamical aspects of the accretion process. Throughout the chapter, we combine the results of these theoretical…

One of the fundamental questions in astronomy is how planetary systems form and evolve. Measuring the planetary occurrence and architecture as a function of time directly addresses this question. In the fourth paper of the Planets Across…

Analyses of exoplanet statistics suggest a trend of giant planet occurrence with host star mass, a clue to how planets like Jupiter form. One missing piece of the puzzle is the occurrence around late K dwarf stars (masses of 0.5-0.75Msun…

There is growing evidence that the population of close-in planets discovered by the Kepler mission was sculpted by atmospheric loss, though the typical timescale for this evolution is not well-constrained. Among a highly complete sample of…

This paper introduces a new method of inferring the intrinsic exoplanet population from Kepler data, based on the assumption that the frequency of exoplanets can be represented by a smooth function of planet radius and period. The method is…

As part of a large Spitzer/MIPS GTO program, we have searched for infrared excesses due to debris disks toward 26 FGK field stars known from radial velocity (RV) studies to have one or more planets. While none of these stars show excesses…

Terrestrial planets are thought to be the result of a vast number of gravitational interactions and collisions between smaller bodies. We use numerical simulations to show that practically identical initial conditions result in a wide array…

In this thesis, I explore two topics in exoplanet science. The first is the prevalence of Earth-size planets in the Milky Way Galaxy. To determine the occurrence of planets having different sizes, orbital periods, and other properties, I…

Determining whether Earth-like planets are common or rare looms as a touchstone in the question of life in the universe. We searched for Earth-size planets that cross in front of their host stars by examining the brightness measurements of…

To date the search for habitable Earth-like planets has primarily focused on nuclear burning stars. I propose that this search should be expanded to cool white dwarf stars that have expended their nuclear fuel. I define the continuously…

We use the optical and near-infrared photometry from the Kepler Input Catalog to provide improved estimates of the stellar characteristics of the smallest stars in the Kepler target list. We find 3897 dwarfs with temperatures below 4000K,…

The sizes of small planets have been known to be bi-modal, with a gap separating planets that have lost their primordial atmospheres (super-Earths), and the ones that retain them (mini-Neptunes). Here, we report evidences for another…

We present models for the formation of terrestrial planets, and the collisional evolution of debris disks, in planetary systems that contain multiple unstable gas giants. We previously showed that the dynamics of the giant planets…