Related papers: The Origin of Planetary Ring Systems
Spurred by the discovery of numerous exoplanets in multiple systems, binaries have become in recent years one of the main topics in planet formation research. Numerous studies have investigated to what extent the presence of a stellar…
Our understanding of planet formation has been rapidly evolving in recent years. The classical planet formation theory, developed when the only known planetary system was our own Solar System, has been revised to account for the observed…
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…
Multiple systems play an important role in the evolution of star clusters. First we discuss several formation mechanisms which depend on the presence of binaries, either primordial or of dynamical origin. Hierarchical configurations are…
We show that stability of planetary systems is intimately connected with their internal order. An arbitrary initial distribution of planets is susceptible to catastrophic events in which planets either collide or are ejected from the…
We investigate whether rings around extrasolar planets could be detected from those planets' transit lightcurves. To this end we develop a basic theoretical framework for calculating and interpreting the lightcurves of ringed planet…
Observations indicate that intermediate mass stars, binary stars, and stellar remnants often host planets; a complete explanation of these systems requires an understanding of how planetary orbits evolve as their central stars lose mass.…
The solar system's dynamical state can be explained by an orbital instability among the giant planets. A recent model has proposed that the giant planet instability happened during terrestrial planet formation. This scenario has been shown…
The discovery of thousands of exoplanets over the last couple of decades has shown that the birth of planets is a very efficient process in nature. Theories invoke a multitude of mechanisms to describe the assembly of planets in the disks…
The stellar spin orientation relative to the orbital planes of multiplanet systems are becoming accessible to observations. Here, we analyze and classify different types of spin-orbit evolution in compact multiplanet systems perturbed by an…
Despite the increase in observational data on exoplanets, the processes that lead to the formation of planets are still not well understood. But thanks to the high number of known exoplanets, it is now possible to look at them as a…
The recent detection of planets around very low mass stars raises the question of the formation, composition and potential habitability of these objects. We use planetary system formation models to infer the properties, in particular their…
Half the known extrasolar planets have orbital eccentricities in excess of 0.3. Such large eccentricities are surprising as it is thought that planets form in a protoplanetary disk on nearly circular orbits much like the current states of…
Orbital resonances are ubiquitous in the Solar system. They play a decisive role in the long term dynamics, and in some cases the physical evolution, of the planets and of their natural satellites, as well as the evolution of small bodies…
Our understanding of the Solar System has been revolutionized over the past decade by the finding that the orbits of the planets are inherently chaotic. In extreme cases, chaotic motions can change the relative positions of the planets…
The giant planets of the solar system likely played a large role in shaping the architecture of the terrestrial planets. Using an updated collision model, we conduct a suite of high resolution N-body integrations to probe the relationship…
Tidal interactions and planet evaporation processes impact the evolution of close-in star-planet systems. We study the impact of stellar rotation on these processes. We compute the time evolution of star-planet systems consisting of a…
About half of all known stellar systems with Sun-like stars consist of two or more stars, significantly affecting the orbital stability of any planet in these systems. Here we study the onset of instability for an Earth-type planet that is…
Stars are commonly formed in binary systems, which provide a natural laboratory for studying planet formation in extreme conditions. In our first paper (Paper I) of a series Xie et al. (2011), we have shown that the intermediate stage -…
The planet formation process and subsequent planet migration may lead to configurations resulting in strong dynamical interactions among the various planets. Well-studied possible outcomes include collisions between planets, scattering…