Related papers: Neptune's Orbital Migration Was Grainy, Not Smooth
Context: The role of Pluto contributing to the long-term evolution of the trans-Neptunian region has been considered significant only over its neighboring Plutinos. However, it has recently been found that the long-term stability of the…
The Kepler mission enabled us to look at the intrinsic population of exoplanets within our galaxy. In period-radius space, the distribution of the intrinsic population of planets contains structure that can trace planet formation and…
Debris disks are thought to be sculptured by neighboring planets. The same is true for the Edgeworth-Kuiper debris disk, yet no direct observational evidence for signatures of giant planets in the Kuiper belt dust distribution has been…
The Neptune Trojans are the most recently discovered population of small bodies in the Solar System. To date, only eight have been discovered, though it is thought likely that the total population at least rivals that of the asteroid belt.…
We investigate the origins of Kepler-419, a peculiar system hosting two nearly coplanar and highly eccentric gas giants with apsidal orientations librating around anti-alignment, and use this system to place constraints on the properties of…
Natural satellite systems present a large variety of orbital configurations in the solar system. While some are clearly the result of known processes, others still have largely unexplained eccentricity and inclination values. Iapetus has a…
The Kepler mission has recently discovered a number of exoplanetary systems, such as Kepler-11 and Kepler-32, in which ensembles of several planets are found in very closely packed orbits (often within a few percent of an AU of one…
The Kepler mission has released over 4496 planetary candidates, among which 3483 planets have been confirmed as of April 2017. The statistical results of the planets show that there are two peaks around 1.5 and 2.0 in the distribution of…
It is likely that multiple bodies with masses between those of Mars and Earth ("planetary embryos") formed in the outer planetesimal disk of the solar system. Some of these were likely scattered by the giant planets into orbits with…
We discover a population of short-period, Neptune-size planets sharing key similarities with hot Jupiters: both populations are preferentially hosted by metal-rich stars, and both are preferentially found in Kepler systems with single…
This paper considers the distribution of dust which originates in the break-up of planetesimals that are trapped in resonance with a planet. There are three grain populations with different spatial distributions: (I) large grains have the…
Recent observations of Kepler multi-planet systems have revealed a number of systems with planets very close to second-order mean motion resonances (MMRs, with period ratio $1:3$, $3:5$, etc.) We present an analytic study of resonance…
A fraction of multiple planet candidate systems discovered from transits by the Kepler mission contain pairs of planet candidates that are in orbital resonance or are spaced slightly too far apart to be in resonance. We focus here on the…
The Neptune desert is no longer empty. A handful of close-in planets with masses between those of Neptune and Saturn have now been discovered, and their puzzling properties have inspired a number of interesting theories on the formation and…
Dozens of families of asteroids in the asteroid belt have similar orbits and compositions because they formed through a collision. However, the icy debris beyond the orbit of Neptune, called the Kuiper Belt, contains only one known family,…
Warm jupiters are an unexpected population of extrasolar planets that are too near to their host to have formed in situ, but distant enough to retain a significant eccentricity in the face of tidal damping. These planets are curiously…
The existence of a giant planet beyond Neptune -- referred to as Planet Nine (P9) -- has been inferred from the clustering of longitude of perihelion and pole position of distant eccentric Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). After updating…
We use the current orbital structure of large (>50km) asteroids in the main asteroid belt to constrain the evolution of the giant planets when they migrated from their primordial orbits to their current ones. Minton & Malhotra (2009) showed…
The orbital distribution of trans-Neptunian objects provides strong evidence for the radial migration of Neptune. The outer planets' orbits are thought to have become unstable during the early stages with Jupiter having scattering…
In this Letter, we give new constraints on planet migration. They were obtained under the assumption that Saturn's current obliquity is due to a capture in resonance with Neptune's ascending node. If planet migration is too fast, then…