Related papers: The orbital eccentricity of small planet systems
Kepler has discovered hundreds of systems with multiple transiting exoplanets which hold tremendous potential both individually and collectively for understanding the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Many of these systems…
We analyze the effect of companion stars on the bulk density of 29 planets orbiting 15 stars in the Kepler field. These stars have at least one stellar companion within 2", and the planets have measured masses and radii, allowing an…
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…
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…
Unresolved stellar companions can cause both under-estimations in the radii of transiting planets and over-estimations of their detectability, affecting our ability to reliably measure planet occurrence rates. To quantify the latter, we…
Exoplanet occurrence rates facilitate comparisons between observations of planets and theoretical models of planet formation. Despite their deductive power, exoplanet occurrence rates for half the stars in the sky are missing because…
This paper presents an orbital analysis of six southern single-lined spectroscopic binary systems. The systems selected were shown to have circular or nearly circular orbits (e < 0.1) from earlier published solutions of only moderate…
We revisit the discovery and implications of the first candidate systems to contain multiple transiting exoplanets. These systems were discovered using data from the Kepler space telescope. The initial paper, presenting five systems…
The rich diversity of multi-planetary systems and their architectures is greatly contrasted by the uniformity exhibited within many of these systems. Previous studies have shown that compact Kepler systems tend to exhibit a peas-in-a-pod…
Recent observations have shown that at least some close-in exoplanets maintain eccentric orbits despite tidal circularization timescales that are typically shorter than stellar ages. We explore gravitational interactions with a distant…
The fate of planets around rapidly evolving stars is not well understood. Previous studies have suggested that relative to the main sequence population, planets transiting evolved stars ($P$ $<$ 100 d) tend to have more eccentric orbits.…
This paper considers secular interactions within multi-planet systems. In particular we consider dynamical evolution of known planetary systems resulting from an additional hypothetical planet on an eccentric orbit. We start with an…
The widespread prevalence of close-in, nearly coplanar super-Earth- and sub-Neptune-sized planets in multiple-planet systems was one of the most surprising results from the Kepler mission. By studying a uniform sample of Kepler "multis"…
Recent studies reveal that the free eccentricities of Kepler-34b and Kepler-413b are much larger than their forced eccentricities, implying that the scattering events may take place in their formation. The observed orbital configuration of…
Recent observation of microlensing technique reveals two giant planets at 2.3 AU and 4.6 AU around the star OGLE-06-109L. The eccentricity of the outer planet (ec) is estimated to be 0.11(+0.17,-0.04), comparable to that of Saturn…
We analyze data from the Quarter 1-17 Data Release 24 (Q1--Q17 DR24) planet candidate catalog from NASA's Kepler mission, specifically comparing systems with single transiting planets to systems with multiple transiting planets, and…
Chaotic dynamics are expected during and after planet formation, and a leading mechanism to explain large eccentricities of gas giant exoplanets is planet-planet gravitational scattering. The same scattering has been invoked to explain…
The large eccentricities of cold Jupiters and the existence of hot Jupiters have long challenged theories of planet formation. A proposed solution to both of these puzzles is high-eccentricity migration, in which an initially cold Jupiter…
We present a new mechanism of generating large planetary eccentricities. This mechanism applies to planets within the inner cavities of their companion protoplanetary disks. A massive disk with an inner truncation may become eccentric due…
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has successfully discovered thousands of exoplanet candidates using the transit method, including hundreds of stars with multiple transiting planets. In order to estimate the frequency of these valuable…