Related papers: Do close-in giant planets orbiting evolved stars p…
The long-term habitability of Earth-like planets requires low orbital eccentricities. A secular perturbation from a distant stellar companion is a very important mechanism in exciting planetary eccentricities, as many of the extrasolar…
The extrasolar planets discovered to date possess unexpected orbital elements. Most orbit their host stars with larger eccentricities and smaller semi-major axes than similarly sized planets in our own solar system do. It is generally…
The abundance and properties of planets orbiting binary stars - circumbinary planets - are largely unknown because they are difficult to detect with currently available techniques. Results from the Kepler satellite and other studies…
Space-based transit missions such as Kepler and TESS have demonstrated that planets are ubiquitous. However, the success of these missions heavily depends on ground-based radial velocity (RV) surveys, which combined with transit photometry…
Small planets are extremely common in the Galaxy, including planets with masses and radii between those of Earth and Neptune. Characterizing these planets' masses requires ultra-precise radial velocities. The ESPRESSO spectrograph was…
The Kepler mission opened the door to a small but bonafide sample of circumbinary planets. Some initial trends have been identified and used to challenge our theories of planet and binary formation. However, the Kepler sample is not only…
The exoplanets discovered so far have been mostly around relatively nearby and bright stars. As a result, the host stars are mostly (i) in the Galactic disk, (ii) relatively massive, and (iii) relatively metal rich. The aim of the SWEEPS…
We conducted a search for very short-period transiting objects in the publicly available Kepler dataset. Our preliminary survey has revealed four planetary candidates, all with orbital periods less than twelve hours. We have analyzed the…
From a long-term Doppler monitoring campaign of 373 giant stars, we have identified ten giants with periodic radial velocity variations that are challenging to associate with planets. Similar cases in the literature are attributed to poorly…
After finding more planets than expected at the shortest period, there has been an effort to explain their numbers by weak tidal friction. However, we find that the strength of tidal dissipation that would produce the occurence distribution…
Although the architectures of compact multiple-planet systems are well-characterized, there has been little examination of their "outer edges", or the locations of their outermost planets. Here we present evidence that the observed…
CONTEXT. Exoplanet searches have demonstrated that giant planets are preferentially found around metal-rich stars and that their fraction increases with the stellar mass. AIMS. During the past six years, we have conducted a radial velocity…
Precision radial velocities are required to discover and characterize planets orbiting nearby stars. Optical and near infrared spectra that exhibit many hundreds of absorption lines can allow the m/s precision levels required for such work.…
The degree of alignment between a star's spin axis and the orbital plane of its planets (the stellar obliquity) is related to interesting and poorly understood processes that occur during planet formation and evolution. Hot Jupiters…
K2-19 is a star, slightly smaller than the Sun, that hosts three transiting planets. Two of these, K2-19 b and c, are between the size of Neptune and Saturn and have orbital periods near a 3:2 commensurability, and exhibit strong…
We have been monitoring 373 very bright (V < 6 mag) G and K giants with high precision optical Doppler spectroscopy for more than a decade at Lick Observatory. Our goal was to discover planetary companions around those stars and to better…
A scatter plot of exoplanet mass against red giant host star radius demonstrates an interesting positive trend: larger stars have more massive planets. This implies that the evolution of a star towards a red giant affects the masses of…
Potentially habitable planets can orbit close enough to their host star that the differential gravity across their diameters can fix the rotation rate at a specific frequency, a process called tidal locking. Tidally locked planets on…
The majority of binary stars do not eclipse. Current searches for transiting circumbinary planets concentrate on eclipsing binaries, and are therefore restricted to a small fraction of potential hosts. We investigate the concept of finding…
Many observed giant planets lie on eccentric orbits. Such orbits could be the result of strong scatterings with other giant planets. The same dynamical instability that produces these scatterings may also cause habitable planets in interior…