Related papers: Frontiers in Planetary Rings Science
The geophysics of extrasolar planets is a scientific topic often regarded as standing largely beyond the reach of near-term observations. This reality in no way diminishes the central role of geophysical phenomena in shaping planetary…
While it may seem counterintuitive that X-ray astronomy should give any insights into low-temperature planetary systems, planets orbit stars whose magnetized surfaces divert a small fraction of the stellar energy into high energy products:…
Small bodies, the unaccreted leftovers of planetary formation, are often mistaken for the leftovers of planetary science in the sense that they are everything else after the planets and their satellites (or sometimes just their regular…
Nearly 30 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet around a main sequence star, thousands of planets have now been confirmed. These discoveries have completely revolutionized our understanding of planetary systems, revealing types…
The study of planets outside our solar system may lead to major advances in our understanding of the Earth, and provide insight into the universal set of rules by which planets form and evolve. To achieve these goals requires applying…
While there have been far fewer missions to the outer Solar System than to the inner Solar System, spacecraft destined for the giant planets have conducted a wide range of fundamental investigations, returning data that continues to reshape…
The unexpected finding of a ring system around the Centaur (10199) Chariklo opened a new window for dynamical studies and posed many questions about the formation and evolutionary mechanisms of Centaurs as well as the relationship to…
The hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered in the past two decades offer a new perspective on planetary structure. Instead of being the archetypal examples of planets, those of our Solar System are merely possible outcomes of…
A statistical study of the environment around Polar Ring Galaxies is presented. Two kinds of search are performed: 1) a study of the concentration and diameters of all the objects surrounding the Polar Rings, within a search field 5 times…
With the start of the Gaia era, the time has come to address the major challenge of deriving the star formation history and evolution of the disk of our MilkyWay. Here we review our present knowledge of the outer regions of the Milky Way…
In the past 15 years, the number of known planets outside of our solar system has grown from about 200 to more than 5000. During that time, we have conducted one of the longest crowdfunding campaigns in history, a nonprofit adopt a star…
As of 2025, over 6000 planets are known to orbit stars other than our Sun. We can measure their sizes and orbital periods, infer their masses and temperatures, and constrain their compositions. Based on these data, about 1% of extrasolar…
Over 300 extrasolar planets (exoplanets) have been detected orbiting nearby stars. We now hope to conduct a census of all planets around nearby stars and to characterize their atmospheres and surfaces with spectroscopy. Rocky planets within…
(Abridged) The discovery of extrasolar planetary systems revealed an unexpected diversity of planetary systems that has revolutionized planet formation theory. A strong program of theoretical research is essential to maximize both the…
Exoplanetary science is a very active field of astronomy nowadays, with questions still opened such as how planetary systems form and evolve (occurrence, process), why such a diversity of exoplanets is observed (mass, radius, orbital…
Future remote sensing of exoplanets will be enhanced by a thorough investigation of our solar system Ice Giants (Neptune-size planets). What can the configuration of the magnetic field tell us (remotely) about the interior, and what…
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…
We develop an idealized dynamical model to predict the typical properties of outer extrasolar planetary systems, at radii beyond 5 AU. Our hypothesis is that dynamical evolution in outer planetary systems is controlled by a combination of…
This chapter reviews the most recent advancements on the topic of terrestrial and giant planet interiors, including Solar System and extrasolar objects. Starting from an observed mass-radius diagram for known planets in the Universe, we…
Although there is abundant and diverse observational evidence in support of white dwarf stars hosting planets or debris disks which form in the catastrophic destruction of various planetary bodies, the key processes that explain these…