Related papers: Spin-orbit Misalignment as a Driver of the Kepler …
Planet formation is often considered in the context of one circumstellar disk around one star. Yet stellar binary systems are ubiquitous, and thus a substantial fraction of all potential planets must form and evolve in more complex,…
A significant fraction of hot Jupiters have orbital axes misaligned with their host stars' spin axes. The large stellar obliquities of these giants have long been considered potential signatures of high-eccentricity migration, which is…
When an extrasolar planet passes in front of its star (transits), its radius can be measured from the decrease in starlight and its orbital period from the time between transits. Multiple planets transiting the same star reveal more: period…
Exoplanets are organized in a broad array of orbital configurations that reflect their formation along with billions of years of dynamical processing through gravitational interactions. This history is encoded in the angular momentum…
High-eccentricity migration is a likely formation mechanism for many observed hot Jupiters, particularly those with a large misalignment between the stellar spin axis and orbital angular momentum axis of the planet. In one version of…
The turbulent environment from which stars form may lead to misalignment between the stellar spin and the remnant protoplanetary disk. By using hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic simulations, we demonstrate that a wide range of stellar…
Short-period super-Earths and mini-Neptunes encircle more than $\sim50\%$ of Sun-like stars and are relatively amenable to direct observational characterization. Despite this, environments in which these planets accrete are difficult to…
The discovery of planets in close orbits around binary stars raises questions about their formation. It is believed that these planets formed in the outer regions of the disc and then migrated through planet-disc interaction to their…
The current orbital geometries of exoplanet systems offer a fossilized record of the systems' dynamical histories. A particularly rich set of dynamical mechanisms is available to exoplanets residing in multi-star systems, which may have…
Do white dwarfs host asteroid systems? Although several lines of argument suggest that white dwarfs may be orbited by large populations of asteroids, transits would provide the most direct evidence. We demonstrate that the Kepler mission…
We measure the sky-projected stellar obliquities (\lambda) in the multiple-transiting planetary systems KOI-94 and Kepler-25, using the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect. In both cases the host stars are well-aligned with the orbital planes of the…
We present a statistical analysis that demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of Kepler candidate multiple transiting systems (multis) indeed represent true, physically-associated transiting planets. Binary stars provide the primary…
The distribution of stellar obliquities provides critical insight into the formation and evolution pathways of exoplanets. In the past decade, it was found that hot stars hosting hot Jupiters are more likely to have high obliquities than…
The presence of gaseous giant planets whose orbits lie in extreme proximity to their host stars ("hot Jupiters"), can largely be accounted for by planetary migration, associated with viscous evolution of proto-planetary nebulae. Recently,…
Despite decades of effort, the mechanisms by which the spin axis of a star and the orbital axes of its planets become misaligned remain elusive. Particularly, it is of great interest whether the large spin-orbit misalignments observed are…
Many planets are observed in stellar binary systems, and their frequency may be comparable to that of planetary systems around single stars. Binary stellar evolution in such systems influences the dynamical evolution of the resident…
NASA's Kepler mission revealed that $\sim 30\%$ of Solar-type stars harbor planets with sizes between that of Earth and Neptune on nearly circular and co-planar orbits with periods less than 100 days. Such short-period compact systems are…
We report rotation periods, variability characteristics, gyrochronological ages for ~950 of the Kepler Object of Interest host stars. We find a wide dispersion in the amplitude of the photometric variability as a function of rotation,…
The Kepler space mission discovered about a dozen planets orbiting around binary stars systems. Most of these circumbinary planets lie near their instability boundaries at about 3 to 5 binary separations. Past attempts to match these final…
The herein presented analytical framework fully describes the motion of coplanar systems consisting of a stellar binary and a planet orbiting both stars on orbital as well as secular timescales. Perturbations of the Runge-Lenz vector are…