Related papers: A Distinct Population of Small Planets: Sub-Earths
Super-Earths are highly irradiated, small planets with bulk densities approximately consistent with Earth. We construct combined interior-atmosphere models of super-Earths that trace the partitioning of water throughout a planet, including…
Substantial orbital migration of massive planets may occur in most extrasolar planetary systems. Since migration is likely to occur after a significant fraction of the dust has been locked up into planetesimals, ubiquitous migration could…
The characterization of Super-Earth-to-Neptune sized exoplanets relies heavily on our understanding of their formation and evolution. In this study, we link a model of planet formation by pebble accretion to the planets' long-term…
Exoplanets observed by the {\it Kepler} telescope exhibit a bi-modal, radius distribution, which is known as the radius gap. We explore an origin of the radius gap, focusing on multi-planet systems. Our simple theoretical argument predicts…
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"…
Super-Earths can form at large orbital radii and migrate inward due to tidal interactions with the circumstellar disk. In this scenario, convergent migration may occur and lead to the formation of resonant pairs of planets. We explore the…
The occurrence rate of young giant planets from direct imaging surveys is a fundamental tracer of the efficiency with which planets form and migrate at wide orbital distances. These measurements have progressively converged to a value of…
A few studies have reported a significant dearth of exoplanets with Neptune mass and radius with orbital periods below $2$--$4$ d. This cannot be explained by observational biases because many Neptunian planets with longer orbital periods…
A large fraction of stars host one or multiple close-in super-Earth planets. There is an active debate about whether these planets formed in situ or at greater distances from the central star and migrated to their current position. It has…
The terrestrial planets formed by accretion of asteroid-like objects within the inner solar system's protoplanetary disk. Previous works have found that forming a small-mass Mars requires the disk to contain little mass beyond ~1.5 au…
Direct imaging observations constrain the fraction of stars orbited by gas giant planets with separations greater than 10 au to about 0.01 only. This is widely believed to indicate that massive protoplanetary discs rarely fragment on…
This paper compares the statistical features of the sample of discovered extrasolar planets with those of the secondaries in nearby spectroscopic binaries, in order to enable us to distinguish between the two populations. Based on 32 planet…
Planet formation occurs around a wide range of stellar masses and stellar system architectures. An improved understanding of the formation process can be achieved by studying it across the full parameter space, particularly toward the…
Kepler has found hundreds of Neptune-size (2-6 R_Earth) planet candidates within 0.5 AU of their stars. The nature of the vast majority of these planets is not known because their masses have not been measured. Using theoretical models of…
We hypothesise that planets are made by tidal downsizing of migrating giant planet embryos. The proposed scheme for planet formation consists of these steps: (i) a massive young protoplanetary disc fragments at R ~ several tens to hundreds…
We reconsider the commonly held assumption that warm debris disks are tracers of terrestrial planet formation. The high occurrence rate inferred for Earth-mass planets around mature solar-type stars based on exoplanet surveys (roughly 20%)…
The field of extrasolar planets has rapidly expanded to include the detection of planets with masses smaller than that of Uranus. Many of these are expected to have little or no hydrogen and helium gas and we might find Earth analogs among…
We first consider how the level of turbulence in a protoplanetary disk affects the formation locations for the observed close-in super-Earths in exosolar systems. We find that a protoplanetary disk that includes a dead zone (a region of low…
A leading model for the origin of super-Earths proposes that planetary embryos migrate inward and pile up on close-in orbits. As large embryos are thought to preferentially form beyond the snow line, this naively predicts that most…
The currently feasible method of detection of Earth-mass planets is transit photometry, with detection probability decreasing with a planet's distance from the star. The existence or otherwise of short-period terrestrial planets will tell…