Related papers: Tilting Uranus: Collisions versus Spin--Orbit Reso…
Neptune's present axial tilt of approximately 28 deg. with respect to its orbital plane can be explained by collisions that its primordial core may have experienced with surrounding planetary embryos during the final stages of its…
Uranus has a tilted rotation axis, which is supposed to be caused by a giant impact. In general, an impact event also changes the internal compositional distribution and drives mass ejection from the planet, which may provide the origin of…
The migration and encounter histories of the giant planets in our Solar System can be constrained by the obliquities of Jupiter and Saturn. We have performed secular simulations with imposed migration and N-body simulations with…
Planet obliquity is the alignment or misalignment of a planet spin axis relative to its orbit normal. In a multiplanet system, this obliquity is a valuable signature of planet formation and evolutionary history. The young $\beta$ Pictoris…
The planet Mercury is locked in a spin-orbit resonance where it rotates three times about its spin axis for every two orbits about the Sun. The current explanation for this unique state assumes that the initial rotation of this planet was…
The origin of Uranus and Neptune remains a challenge for planet formation models. A potential explanation is that the planets formed from a population of a few planetary embryos with masses of a few Earth masses which formed beyond Saturn's…
The spin-orbit obliquity of a planetary system constraints its formation history. A large obliquity may either indicate a primordial misalignment between the star and its gaseous disk or reflect the effect of different mechanisms tilting…
Changes in planetary obliquity, or axial tilt, influence the climates on Earth-like planets. In the solar system, the Earth's obliquity is stabilized due to interactions with our moon and the resulting {small amplitude variations…
It is widely accepted that the large obliquity of Uranus is the result of a great tangential collision (GC) with an Earth size proto-planet at the end of the accretion. We attempt to constraint the GC scenario as the cause of Uranus'…
The recent characterization of transiting close-in planets has revealed an intriguing population of sub-Neptunes with highly tilted and even polar orbits relative to their host star's equator. Any viable theory for the origin of these…
The large spin-orbit misalignments in the DI Herculis stellar binary system have resolved the decades-long puzzle of the anomalously slow apsidal precession rate, but raise new questions regarding the origin of the obliquities. This paper…
We study the effects of planetary late migration on the gas giants obliquities. We consider the planetary instability models from Nesvorny & Morbidelli (2012), in which the obliquities of Jupiter and Saturn can be excited when the…
The origin of the highly eccentric, inclined, and resonance-locked orbit of Pluto has long been a puzzle. A possible explanation has been proposed recently [Malhotra, R., {\it Nature} 365:819-21 (1993)] which suggests that these…
The stellar spin orientation relative to the orbital planes of multiplanet systems are becoming accessible to observations. Here, we analyze and classify different types of spin-orbit evolution in compact multiplanet systems perturbed by an…
About a dozen exoplanetary systems have been discovered with three or more planets participating in a sequence of mean-motion resonances. The unique and complex architectures of these so-called "resonant chains" motivate efforts to…
We have investigated the obliquity evolution of terrestrial planets in habitable zones (at ~ 1AU) in extrasolar planetary systems, due to tidal interactions with their satellite and host star with wide varieties of satellite-to-planet mass…
A Uranus orbiter would be well positioned to detect the planet's free oscillation modes, whose frequencies can resolve questions about Uranus's weakly constrained interior. We calculate the spectra that may manifest in resonances with ring…
NASA's Kepler mission revealed that $\sim 30\%$ of Solar-type stars harbor planets with sizes between that of Earth and Neptune on nearly circular and co-planar orbits with periods less than 100 days. Such short-period compact systems are…
The origin of rings around giant planets remains elusive. Saturn's rings are massive and made of 90-95% of water ice. In contrast, the much less massive rings of Uranus and Neptune are dark and likely to have higher rock fraction. Here we…
Spin-orbit misalignments have been detected in exoplanetary systems and binary star systems. Tidal interactions may have played an important role in the evolution of the spin-orbit angle. In this study, we investigate the tidal interactions…