Related papers: The Parking Lot Planet
Exoplanet habitability is traditionally assessed by comparing a planet's semi-major axis to the location of its host star's "habitable zone," the shell around a star for which Earth-like planets can possess liquid surface water. The Kepler…
In an attempt to select stars that can host planets with characteristics similar to our own, we selected seven solar-type stars known to host planets in the habitable zone and for which spectroscopic stellar parameters are available. For…
Exoplanetary systems host giant planets on substantially non-circular, close-in orbits. We propose that these eccentricities arise in a phase of giant impacts, analogous to the final stage of Solar System assembly that formed Earth's Moon.…
Provided that sufficient resources are deployed, we can look forward to an extraordinary future in which we will characterize potentially habitable planets. Until now, we have had to base interpretations of observations on habitability…
This review focuses on recent results in advancing our understanding of the location and distribution of habitable exo-Earth environments. We first review the qualities that define a habitable planet/moon environment. We extend these…
In this paper, the parking problem of a swarm of mobile robots has been studied. The robots are deployed at the nodes of an infinite grid, which has a subset of prefixed nodes marked as parking nodes. Each parking node p_i has a capacity of…
Models of terrestrial planet formation in the presence of a migrating giant planet have challenged the notion that hot-Jupiter systems lack terrestrial planets. We briefly review this issue and suggest that hot-Jupiter systems should be…
What is habitability? Can we quantify it? What do we mean under the term habitable or potentially habitable planet? With estimates of the number of planets in our Galaxy alone running into billions, possibly a number greater than the number…
The selection of optimal targets in the search for life represents a highly important strategic issue. In this Letter, we evaluate the benefits of searching for life around a potentially habitable planet orbiting a star of arbitrary mass…
This paper presents a classification framework for the architectures of planetary systems based on a complete survey of the confirmed exoplanet population. With nearly 6000 confirmed exoplanets discovered, including more than 300…
The conditions that a planet must fulfill to be habitable are not precisely known. However, it is comparatively easier to define conditions under which a planet is very likely not habitable. Finding such conditions is important as it can…
In the past 15 years, astronomers have revealed that a significant fraction of the stars should harbor planets and that it is likely that terrestrial planets are abundant in our galaxy. Among these planets, how many are habitable, i.e.…
The large number of detected giant exoplanets offers the opportunity to improve our understanding of the formation mechanism, evolution, and interior structure of gas giant planets. The two main models for giant planet formation are core…
One of the primary surprises of exoplanet detections has been the discovery of compact planetary systems, whereby numerous planets reside within ~0.5 AU of the host star. Many of these kinds of systems have been discovered in recent years,…
The Kepler mission has discovered a large number of planetary systems. We analyze the implications of the discovered single/multi-exoplanet systems from Kepler's data. As done in previous works, we test a simple model in which the intrinsic…
Planet Planet scattering is a leading dynamical mechanism invoked to explain the present orbital distribution of exoplanets. Many stars belong to binary systems, therefore it is important to understand how this mechanism works in presence…
This paper presents a solution for the problem of optimal planning for a robot in a collaborative human-robot team, where the human supervisor is intermittently available to assist the robot in completing tasks more quickly. Specifically,…
The ejection of planets by the instability of planetary systems is a potential source of free-floating planets. We numerically simulate multi-planet systems to study the evolution process, the properties of surviving systems, and the…
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
Understanding the formation and dynamical evolution of habitable planets in extrasolar planetary systems is a challenging task. In this respect, systems with multiple giant planets and/or multiple stars present special complications. The…