Related papers: Why exomoons must be rare?

This article relates two topics of central importance in modern astronomy - the discovery some fifteen years ago of the first planets around other stars (exoplanets), and the centuries-old problem of understanding the origin of our own…

In recent years, there has been interest in Earth-like exoplanets in the habitable zones of low mass stars ($\sim0.1-0.6\,M_\odot$). Furthermore, it has been argued that a large moon may be important for stabilizing conditions on a planet…

Context: The Solar System giant planets harbour a wide variety of moons. Moons around exoplanets are plausibly similarly abundant, even though most of them are likely too small to be easily detectable with modern instruments. Moons are…

Most extrasolar planets are observed to have eccentricities much larger than those in the solar system. Some of these planets have sibling planets, with comparable masses, orbiting around the same host stars. In these multiple planetary…

The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…

The varied surfaces and atmospheres of planets make them interesting places to live, explore, and study from afar. Unfortunately, the great distance to exoplanets makes it impossible to resolve their disk with current or near-term…

Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…

The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…

For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…

Many exoplanets in close-in orbits are observed to have relatively high eccentricities and large stellar obliquities. We explore the possibility that these result from planet-planet scattering by studying the dynamical outcomes from a large…

Analyzing exoplanets detected by radial velocity or transit observations, we determine the multiplicity of exoplanet host stars in order to study the influence of a stellar companion on the properties of planet candidates. Matching the host…

Studying exoplanets with their parent stars is crucial to understand their population, formation and history. We review some of the key questions regarding their evolution with particular emphasis on giant gaseous exoplanets orbiting close…

As a direct result of ongoing efforts to detect more exoplanetary systems, an ever-increasing number of multiple-planet systems are being announced. But how many of these systems are truly what they seem? In many cases, such systems are…

The hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered in the past two decades offer a new perspective on planetary structure. Instead of being the archetypal examples of planets, those of our Solar System are merely possible outcomes of…

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…

All the giant planets in the solar system host a large number of natural satellites. Moons in extrasolar systems are difficult to detect, but a Neptune-sized exomoon candidate has been recently found around a Jupiter-sized planet in the…

We investigate how the variation of the obliquity (the axial tilt) of a hypothetical exo-Earth is effected by the presence of a satellite, an exo-Moon. Namely, we study analytically and numerically how the range of obliquity of the…

Although many methods of detecting extra-solar planets have been proposed and successful implementation of some of these methods enabled a rapidly increasing number of exoplanet detections, little has been discussed about the method of…

When we are fortunate enough to view an exoplanetary system nearly edge-on, the star and planet periodically eclipse each other. Observations of eclipses (transits and occultations) provide a bonanza of information that cannot be obtained…

Having a massive moon has been considered as a primary mechanism for stabilized planetary obliquity, an example of which being our Earth. This is, however, not always consistent with the exoplanetary cases. This article details the…