Related papers: A Tendency Toward Alignment in Single-Star Warm Ju…
Warm giant planets with orbital periods of tens of days exhibit a positive correlation between mass and eccentricity. We interpret this trend as the outcome of planet-planet scattering, representing a transition from collision-dominated…
Many hot Jupiter (HJ) systems have been observed to have their stellar spin axis misaligned with the planet's orbital angular momentum axis. The origin of this spin-orbit misalignment and the formation mechanism of HJs remain poorly…
The current orbital geometries of exoplanet systems offer a fossilized record of the systems' dynamical histories. A particularly rich set of dynamical mechanisms is available to exoplanets residing in multi-star systems, which may have…
Measuring the obliquity distribution of stars hosting warm Jupiters may help us to understand the formation of close-orbiting gas giants. Few such measurements have been performed due to practical difficulties in scheduling observations of…
Warm Jupiters lay out an excellent laboratory for testing models of planet formation and migration. Their separation from the host star makes tidal reprocessing of their orbits ineffective, which preserves the orbital architectures that…
Sub-Saturns have been reported to preferentially occupy near-polar orbits, but this conclusion has so far been based primarily on systems with cool host stars; obliquity measurements for sub-Saturns orbiting hot stars remain scarce.…
Understanding the diverse formation and migration pathways that shape exoplanetary systems requires characterizing both their atmospheric properties and their orbital dynamics. A key dynamical diagnostic is the projected spin-orbit angle -…
Recent discoveries of several transiting planets with clearly non-zero eccentricities and some large inclinations started changing the simple picture of close-in planets having circular and well-aligned orbits. Two major scenarios to form…
Spin-orbit misalignments have been detected in exoplanetary systems and binary star systems. Tidal interactions may have played an important role in the evolution of the spin-orbit angle. In this study, we investigate the tidal interactions…
The nearly circular (mean eccentricity <e>~0.06) and coplanar (mean mutual inclination <i>~3 deg) orbits of the Solar System planets motivated Kant and Laplace to put forth the hypothesis that planets are formed in disks, which has…
Models of planet formation and evolution predict that giant planets form efficiently in protoplanetary disks, that most of these migrate rapidly to the disk's inner edge, and that, if the arriving planet's mass is $\lesssim$ Jupiter's mass,…
Recent work suggests that many short-period extrasolar planets may have spin obliquities that are significantly tilted with respect to their orbital planes. These large obliquities are a natural outcome of ``secular spin-orbit resonance'',…
During its 5 year mission, the Kepler spacecraft has uncovered a diverse population of planetary systems with orbital configurations ranging from single-transiting planets to systems of multiple planets co-transiting the parent star. By…
The orbits of giant extrasolar planets often have surprisingly small semi-major axes, large eccentricities, or severe misalignments between their normals and their host stars' spin axes. In some formation scenarios invoking Kozai-Lidov…
With JWST we can now characterize the atmospheres of planets on longer orbital planets, but this moves us into a regime where we cannot assume that tidal forces from the star have eroded planets' obliquities and synchronized their rotation…
Hot-Jupiter planets must form at large separations from their host stars where the temperatures are cool enough for their cores to condense. They then migrate inwards to their current observed orbital separations. Different theories of how…
The obliquity between a planet's orbital axis and its host star's spin axis provides crucial insights into planetary formation and migration. Planets with scaled semi-major axes ($a/R_\star$) large enough to be unaffected by tidal…
Stars with hot Jupiters sometimes have high obliquities, which are possible relics of hot Jupiter formation. Based on the characteristics of systems with and without high obliquities, it is suspected that obliquities are tidally damped when…
We present photometric and spectroscopic observations of the 2009 Feb. 2 transit of the exoplanet XO-3b. The new data show that the planetary orbital axis and stellar rotation axis are misaligned, as reported earlier by Hebrard and…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin effect allows us to measure the projected stellar obliquity of exoplanets. From the spin-orbit alignment, planet formation and migration theories can be tested to improve our understanding of the currently observed…