Related papers: How Special Is the Solar System?
The known extrasolar planets exhibit many interesting and surprising features--extremely short-period orbits, high-eccentricity orbits, mean-motion and secular resonances, etc.--and have dramatically expanded our appreciation of the…
Just fourteen years ago the Solar System represented the only known planetary system in the Galaxy, and conceptions of planet formation were shaped by this sample of one. Since then, 320 planets have been discovered orbiting 276 individual…
Understanding planetary habitability is one of the major challenges of the current scientific era, particularly given the discovery of a large and diverse terrestrial exoplanet population. Discerning the primary factors that contribute to…
Understanding the concept of habitability is related to an evolutionary knowledge of the particular planet-in-question. Additional indications so-called "systemic aspects" of the planetary system as a whole governs a particular planet's…
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…
Planetary science beyond the boundaries of our Solar System is today in its infancy. Until a couple of decades ago, the detailed investigation of the planetary properties was restricted to objects orbiting inside the Kuiper Belt. Today, we…
Most stars are formed in a cluster or association, where the number density of stars can be high. This means that a large fraction of initially-single stars will undergo close encounters with other stars and/or exchange into binaries. We…
The Solar System hosts the most studied and best understood major and minor planetary bodies - and the only extraterrestrial bodies to have been visited by spacecraft. The Solar System therefore provides important constraints on both the…
The search for extrasolar Earth-like planets is underway. Over 100 extrasolar giant planets are known to orbit nearby sun-like stars, including several in multiple-planet systems. These planetary systems are stepping stones for the search…
Understanding the origin and long-term evolution of the Solar System is a fundamental goal of planetary science and astrophysics. This chapter describes our current understanding of the key processes that shaped our planetary system,…
The basic geometry of the Solar System -- the shapes, spacings, and orientations of the planetary orbits -- has long been a subject of fascination as well as inspiration for planet formation theories. For exoplanetary systems, those same…
How can scientists conclude with high confidence that an exoplanet hosts life? As telescopes come on line over the next 20 years that can directly observe photons from terrestrial exoplanets, this question will dictate the activities of…
The existence of intelligent, interstellar traveling and colonising life is a key assumption behind the Fermi Paradox. Until recently, detecting signs of life elsewhere has been so technically challenging as to seem almost impossible.…
Despite great advances in our understanding of the formation of the Solar System, the evolution of the Earth, and the chemical basis for life, we are not much closer than the ancient Greeks to an answer of whether life has arisen and…
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…
From the numerous detected planets outside the Solar system, no terrestrial planet comparable to our Earth has been discovered so far. The search for an Exo-Earth is certainly a big challenge which may require the detections of planetary…
Earth is the only planet known to harbor life, therefore we may speculate on how the nature of the Sun-Earth interaction is relevant to life on Earth, and how the behavior of other stars may influence the development of life on their…
Our Solar System includes the Sun, eight major planets and their moons, along with numerous asteroids, comets, and dust particles, collectively known as the small Solar System bodies. Small bodies are relics from the birth of the Solar…
In the past 15 years, astronomers have revealed that a significant fraction of the stars should harbor planets and that it is likely that terrestrial planets are abundant in our galaxy. Among these planets, how many are habitable, i.e.…
Placing the architecture of the Solar System within the broader context of planetary architectures is one of the primary topics of interest within planetary science. Exoplanet discoveries have revealed a large range of system architectures,…