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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…

White dwarf planetary science is a rapidly growing field of research featuring a diverse set of observations and theoretical explorations. Giant planets, minor planets, and debris discs have all been detected orbiting white dwarfs. The…

Extrasolar planets abound in almost any possible configuration. However, until five years ago, there was a lack of planets orbiting closer than 0.5 au to giant or subgiant stars. Since then, recent detections have started to populated this…

Although the Sun is our closest star by many orders of magnitude and despite having sunspot records stretching back to ancient China, our knowledge of the Sun's magnetic field is far from complete. Indeed, even now, after decades of study,…

We have recently hit the milestone of 5,000 exoplanets discovered. In stark contrast with the Solar System, most of the exoplanets we know to date orbit extremely close to their host stars, causing them to lose copious amounts of gas…

Solid material in protoplanetary discs will suffer one of two fates after the epoch of planet formation; either being bound up into planetary bodies, or remaining in smaller planetesimals to be ground into dust. These end states are…

When extrasolar planets are observed to transit their parent stars, we are granted unprecedented access to their physical properties. It is only for transiting planets that we are permitted direct estimates of the planetary masses and…

We examine recent studies on the formation rate of planetary nebulae and find this rate to be about one-third of the formation rate of white dwarfs. This implies than only about one-third of all planetary nebulae that evolve to form white…

The great majority of exoplanets discovered so far are orbiting cool, low-mass stars whose properties are relatively similar to the Sun. However, the stellar magnetism of these stars can be significantly different from the solar one, both…

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…

Most extrasolar planets currently known were discovered by means of an indirect method that measures the stellar wobble caused by the planet. We previously studied a triple system composed of a star and a nearby binary on circular coplanar…

The light scattered by an extrasolar Earth-like planet's surface and atmosphere will vary in intensity and color as the planet rotates; the resulting light curve will contain information about the planet's properties. Since most of the…

Transiting extrasolar planets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation of planets as well as their internal structure. The existence of a secondary eclipse enables further study of the thermal properties of the the planet by…

A major focus of the planetary science and astrobiology community is the understanding of planetary habitability, including the myriad factors that control the evolution and sustainability of temperate surface environments such as that of…

This review presents an insight into our current knowledge of the atmospheres of the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the satellite Titan, and those of exoplanets. It deals with the thermal structure, aerosol…

With several detections, the technique of gravitational microlensing has proven useful for studying planets that orbit stars at Galactic distances, and it can even be applied to detect planets in neighbouring galaxies. So far, planet…

Planetary nebulae have been used as tracers of light and kinematics for the stellar populations in early-type galaxies since more than twenty years. Several empirical properties have surfaced: for example the invariant bright cut-off of the…

The traditional method for detecting extra-solar planets relies on measuring a small stellar wobble which is assumed to be caused by a planet orbiting the star. Recently, it was suggested that a similar stellar wobble could be caused by a…

Stars and their exoplanets evolve together. Depending on the physical characteristics of these systems, such as age, orbital distance and activity of the host stars, certain types of star-exoplanet interactions can dominate during given…

The easiest exoplanets to detect are those that orbit very close to their hoststars. As a result, even though these planets are quite rare, they represent amajor fraction of the current exoplanet population. A side-effect of theproximity…