Related papers: On the Stability of Additional Moons Orbiting Kepl…
The satellites of extrasolar planets (exomoons) have been recently proposed as astrobiological targets. Since giant planets in the habitable zone are thought to have migrated there, it is possible that they may have captured a former…
The diversity and quantity of moons in the Solar System suggest a manifold population of natural satellites exist around extrasolar planets. Of peculiar interest from an astrobiological perspective, the number of sizable moons in the…
We conduct a systematic survey of the regions in which distant satellites can orbit stably around the four giant planets in the solar system, using orbital integrations of up to $10^9$ yr. In contrast to previous investigations, we use a…
The orbits in the HD 160691 planetary system at first appeared highly unstable, but using the MEGNO and FLI techniques of global dynamics analysis in the orbital parameter space we have found a stabilizing mechanism that could be the key to…
Outer satellites of the planets have distant, eccentric orbits that can be highly inclined or even retrograde relative to the equatorial planes of their planets. These irregular orbits cannot have formed by circumplanetary accretion and are…
An exomoon will produce transit timing variations (TTVs) upon the parent planet and their undersampled nature causes half of such TTVs to manifest within a frequency range of 2 to 4 cycles, irrespective of exomoon demographics. Here, we…
For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…
The transit method is a promising means to detect exomoons, but few candidates have been identified. For planets close to their stars, the dynamical interaction between a satellite's orbit and the star must be important in their evolution.…
In previous hydrodynamical simulations, we found a mechanism for nearly circular binary stars, like Kepler-413, to trap two planets in a stable 1:1 resonance. Therefore, the stability of coorbital configurations becomes a relevant question…
Kepler-22b is the first transiting planet to have been detected in the habitable-zone of its host star. At 2.4 Earth radii, Kepler-22b is too large to be considered an Earth-analog, but should the planet host a moon large enough to maintain…
In recent years, technical and theoretical work to detect moons and rings around exoplanets has been attempted. The small mass/size ratios between moons and planets means this is very challenging, having only one exoplanetary system where…
The aim of my dissertation is to investigate habitability in extra-Solar Systems. Most of the time, only planets are considered as possible places where extraterrestrial life can emerge and evolve, however, their moons could be inhabited,…
The Kepler mission has revealed that Earth-sized planets are common, and dozens have been discovered to orbit in or near their host star's habitable zone. A major focus in astronomy is to determine which of these exoplanets are likely to…
Transit photometry of the exoplanet candidate Kepler-1625b has recently been interpreted to show hints of a moon. We aim to clarify whether the exomoon-like signal is really caused by a large object in orbit around Kepler-1625b. We explore…
The star Kepler-1625 recently attracted considerable attention when an analysis of the stellar photometric time series from the Kepler mission was interpreted as showing evidence of a large exomoon around the transiting Jupiter-sized planet…
The planet Kepler-16b is known to follow a circumbinary orbit around a system of two main-sequence stars. We construct stability diagrams in the "pericentric distance - eccentricity" plane, which show that Kepler-16b is in a hazardous…
It is known, that possibility to capture on a satellite orbit is decreased with primary orbital eccentricity increasing. It means, that satellites of planet on eccentric orbit are less stable. We study problem by analytical and numeric…
A Neptune-sized exomoon candidate was recently announced by Teachey & Kipping, orbiting a 287 day gas giant in the Kepler-1625 system. However, the system is poorly characterized and needs more observations to be confirmed, with the next…
We perform numerical integrations of four-body (star, planet, planet, satellite) systems to investigate the stability of satellites in planetary Systems with Tightly-packed Inner Planets (STIPs). We find that the majority of closely-spaced…
Exoplanet discoveries have motivated numerous efforts to find unseen populations of exomoons, yet they have been unsuccessful. A plausible explanation is that most discovered planets are located on close-in orbits, which would make their…