Related papers: Spin-orbit alignment of the $\beta$ Pictoris plane…
The angle between stellar spin axes and planetary orbits -- stellar obliquity -- probes the dynamics of planetary migration and evolution. The obliquities of giant planets have been extensively studied because they are the most easily…
Kepler-56 is a multi-planet system containing two coplanar inner planets that are in orbits misaligned with respect to the spin axis of the host star, and an outer planet. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain the broad…
Direct imaging of exoplanets requires both high contrast and high spatial resolution. Here, we present the first scientific results obtained with the newly commissioned Apodizing Phase Plate coronagraph (APP) on VLT/NACO. We detected the…
Stellar obliquities, or spin-orbit angles, prevalent in exoplanet systems, can impose important constraints on their formation and evolution histories. Recent studies suggest that primordial misalignments between protoplanetary disks and…
The Kepler mission and its successor K2 have brought forth a cascade of transiting planets. Many of these planetary systems exhibit multiple members, but a large fraction possess only a single transiting example. This overabundance of…
Very few debris discs have been imaged in scattered light at wavelengths beyond 3 microns because the thermal emission from both the sky and the telescope is generally too strong with respect to the faint emission of a debris disc. We…
Spin-orbit obliquity measurements of hot-Jupiter systems constrain giant planet migration and tidal evolution. In binary systems, combining stellar obliquities with the orbit-orbit angle ($\gamma$) between the planetary and stellar…
Despite the wide range of planet-star (mis)alignments in the mature population of transiting exoplanets, the small number of known young transiting planets are nearly all aligned with the rotation axes of their host stars, as determined by…
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…
Direct imaging observations are biased towards wide-separation, massive companions that have degenerate formation histories. Although the majority of exoplanets are expected to form via core accretion, most directly imaged exoplanets have…
Main-sequence stars earlier than spectral type ~F6 or so are expected to rotate rapidly due to their radiative exteriors. This rapid rotation leads to an oblate stellar figure. It also induces the photosphere to be hotter (by up to several…
The discovery of close in, giant planets (hot Jupiters) with orbital angular momentum vectors misaligned with respect to the rotation axis of their host stars presents problems for planet formation theories in which planets form in discs…
In planetary systems with sufficiently small inter-planet spacing, close encounters can lead to planetary collisions/mergers or ejections. We study the spin property of the merger products of two giant planets in a statistical manner using…
We consider the effect of planetary spin on the planetary radial velocity (PRV) in dayside spectra of exoplanets. To understand the spin effect qualitatively, we derive an analytic formula of the intensity-weighted radial velocity from…
Transiting planets in multiple-star systems, especially high-order multiples, make up a small fraction of the known planet population but provide unique opportunities to study the environments in which planets would have formed.…
We report a spin-orbit misalignment for the hot-Jupiter HATS-14b, measuring a projected orbital obliquity of |lambda|= 76 -5/+4 deg. HATS-14b orbits a high metallicity, 5400 K G dwarf in a relatively short period orbit of 2.8 days. This…
Although most of the circumbinary planets detected by the Kepler spacecraft are on orbits that are closely aligned with the binary orbital plane, the systems Kepler-413 and Kepler-453 exhibit small misalignments of $\sim 2.5^\circ$. One…
We present Keck images of the dust disk around Beta Pictoris at 17.9 microns that reveal new structure in its morphology. Within 1" (19 AU) of the star, the long axis of the dust emission is rotated by more than 10 degrees with respect to…
Here we present an ensemble study of spin-orbit alignment in 51 close double star systems. We determine spin-orbit angles, obliquities, in 39 of these systems making use of recently improved apsidal motion rate measurements and apsidal…
We present new radial-velocity measurements of HAT-P-13, a star with two previously known companions: a transiting giant planet "b" with an orbital period of 3 days, and a more massive object "c" on a 1.2 yr, highly eccentric orbit. For…