Related papers: Close stellar encounters kicking planets out of ha…
The number of potentially habitable planets continues to increase, but we lack the time and resources to characterize all of them. With $\sim$30 known potentially habitable planets and an ever-growing number of candidate and confirmed…
Understanding the occurrence of Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of Sun-like stars is essential to the search for Earth analogues. Yet a lack of reliable Kepler detections for such planets has forced many estimates to be derived…
Planetary rotation rate is a key parameter in determining atmospheric circulation and hence the spatial pattern of clouds. Since clouds can exert a dominant control on planetary radiation balance, rotation rate could be critical for…
Whether binaries can harbor potentially habitable planets depends on several factors including the physical properties and the orbital characteristics of the binary system. While the former determines the location of the habitable zone…
Despite the discovery of thousands of exoplanets in recent years, the number of known exoplanets in star clusters remains tiny. This may be a consequence of close stellar encounters perturbing the dynamical evolution of planetary systems in…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between multiple giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities seem…
The present dynamical configuration of planets in binary star systems may not reflect their formation process since the binary orbit may have changed in the past after the planet formation process was completed. An observed binary system…
We investigate the orbital dynamics of four-planet systems consisting of Earth-mass planets on initially-circular, coplanar orbits around a star of one solar mass. In our simulations, the innermost planet's semimajor axis is set at 1 AU,…
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…
Most stars form in clusters where relatively close encounters with other stars are common and can leave imprints on the orbital architecture of planetary systems. In this paper, we investigate the inclination excitation of debris disk…
Galactic globular clusters are old, dense star systems typically containing 10\super{4}--10\super{7} stars. As an old population of stars, globular clusters contain many collapsed and degenerate objects. As a dense population of stars,…
We analyze the evolution of the potentially habitable planet Proxima Centauri b to identify environmental factors that affect its long-term habitability. We consider physical processes acting on size scales ranging from the galactic to the…
By now, observations of exoplanets have found more than 50 binary star systems hosting 71 planets. We expect these numbers to increase as more than 70% of the main sequence stars in the solar neighborhood are members of binary or multiple…
In the last years several exoplanets have been discovered that orbit one component of a compact binary system (separation < 50 astronomical units), the probably best-known case is gamma-Cephei. So far, all attempts to explain the in-situ…
Although it is commonly agreed that the presence of a close stellar companion is likely to affect planet formation and evolution, the precise effects and their actual impact on planet occurrence and properties are still debated. In…
We analyze the properties of searches devoted to finding planetary transits by observing simple stellar systems, such as globular clusters, open clusters, and the Galactic bulge. We develop the analytic tools necessary to predict the number…
Context. The presence of a stellar companion can strongly influence the architecture and long-term stability of planetary systems. Motivated by the discovery of exoplanets exhibiting extremely high eccentricities (e >= 0.8) in systems with…
Recent ground and space-based observations show that stars with multiple planets are common in the galaxy. Most of these observational methods are biased toward detecting large planets near to their host stars. Because of these…
The habitability of planets is strongly affected by impacts from comets and asteroids. Indications from the ages of Moon rocks suggest that the inner Solar System experienced an increased rate of impacts roughly 3.8 Gya known as the Late…
Massive stars are known to have a high multiplicity, with examples of higher order multiples among the nearest and best studied objects. In this paper we study hierarchical multiple systems (an inner binary as a component of a wider binary)…