Related papers: Moon-packing around an Earth-mass Planet
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 formation of the solar system's giant planets predated the ultimate epoch of massive impacts that concluded the process of terrestrial planet formation. Following their formation, the giant planets' orbits evolved through an episode of…
We investigate the prospects for the capture of the proposed Planet 9 from other stars in the Sun's birth cluster. Any capture scenario must satisfy three conditions: the encounter must be more distant than ~150 au to avoid perturbing the…
Many dynamical aspects of the solar system can be explained by the outer planets experiencing a period of orbital instability sometimes called the Nice Model. Though often correlated with a perceived delayed spike in the lunar cratering…
The five libration points of a sun-planet system are stable or unstable fixed positions at which satellites or asteroids can remain fixed relative to the two orbiting bodies. A moon orbiting around the planet causes a time-dependent…
[abridged] In the typical giant-impact scenario for the Moon formation most of the Moon's material originates from the impactor. Any Earth-impactor composition difference should, therefore, correspond to a comparable Earth-Moon composition…
Earth-like planets in the habitable zone (HZ) of M-dwarfs have recently been targeted in the search for exomoons. We study the stability and lifetime of large (Luna-like) moons, accounting for the effects of 3-body interactions and tidal…
Recent exoplanet surveys revealed that for solar-type stars, close-in Super-Earths are ubiquitous and many of them are in multi-planet systems. These systems are more compact than the Solar System's terrestrial planets. However, there have…
Small planets, 1-4x the size of Earth, are extremely common around Sun-like stars, and surprisingly so, as they are missing in our solar system. Recent detections have yielded enough information about this class of exoplanets to begin…
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 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…
Studies of transiting extra-solar planets are of key importance for understanding the nature of planets outside our Solar System, because their densities can be determined, constraining of what the planets are made of. Using the data…
About half of all known stellar systems with Sun-like stars consist of two or more stars, significantly affecting the orbital stability of any planet in these systems. This observational evidence has prompted a large array of theoretical…
We perform numerical simulations to study the Habitable zones (HZs) and dynamical structure for Earth-mass planets in multiple planetary systems. For example, in the HD 69830 system, we extensively explore the planetary configuration of…
All four giant planets and several minor bodies in the Solar System host rings. However, rings around moons have yet to be observed. A host planet can produce magnetic fields that affect its moons, adding a wealth of dynamical phenomena…
Confirmation of the first exomoon remains elusive. Although several exomoon candidates exist around single stars, there are currently no candidates around circumbinary planets (CBPs). Most circumbinary planets are thought to form far from…
Since the discovery of a planet transiting its host star in the year 2000, thousands of additional exoplanets and exoplanet candidates have been detected, mostly by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Some of them are almost as small as the…
We study the orbital evolution of the 4 giant planets of our solar system in a gas disk. Our investigation extends the previous works by Masset and Snellgrove (2001) and Morbidelli and Crida (2007, MC07), which focussed on the dynamics of…
Gas giant planets in the Solar system host large satellite systems with multiple regular and irregular moons. Regular moons revolve around their host planet in circular, low inclination short period orbits, and are thought to form in-situ…
High-multiplicity Kepler systems (referred to as Kepler multis) are often tightly packed and may be on the verge of instability. Many systems of this type could have experienced past instabilities, where the compact orbits and often low…