Related papers: Rogue planets and brown dwarfs: Predicting the pop…
We estimate the rate of collisions between stars and free-floating planets (FFPs) in globular clusters, in particular the collision of FFPs with red giant branch (RGB) stars. Recent dynamical simulations imply that the density of such…
Giant planets and brown dwarfs play a crucial role in star and planet formation, as they are situated at the boundary between planets and stars with uncertain formation mechanisms. Previous observational searches for the formation boundary…
"Free-floating, non-deuterium-burning, substellar objects" are isolated bodies of a few Jupiter masses found in very young open clusters and associations, nearby young moving groups and in the immediate vicinity of the Sun. They are neither…
As of August 2019, among the more than 4000 confirmed exoplanets, only one has been detected in a globular cluster (GC) M4. The scarce of exoplanet detections motivates us to employ direct $N$-body simulations to investigate the dynamical…
We study the planet populations in the discovery window of the CoRoT-space-telescope scheduled for launch on December 27th. We base the prediction on `first principles' calculations of planet formation in the framework of the planetesimal…
Since 1995, more than 500 exoplanets have been detected using different techniques, of which 11 were detected with gravitational microlensing. Most of these are gravitationally bound to their host stars. There is some evidence of…
Microlensing surveys suggest the presence of a surprisingly large population of free-floating planets, with a rate of about two Neptunes per star. The origin of such objects is not known, neither do we know if they are truly unbound or are…
Context. High contrast imaging is a powerful technique to search for gas giant planets and brown dwarfs orbiting at separation larger than several AU. Around solar-type stars, giant planets are expected to form by core accretion or by…
We present limits on planetary companions to pulsating white dwarf stars. A subset of these stars exhibit extreme stability in the period and phase of some of their pulsation modes; a planet can be detected around such a star by searching…
The Gaia spacecraft presents an unprecedented opportunity to reveal the population of long period (a>1\,au) exoplanets orbiting stars across the H-R diagram, including white dwarfs. White dwarf planetary systems have played an important…
As the oldest building blocks of our Galaxy, globular clusters retain the archaeological footprint of the early stellar environments. Accurate absolute ages of globular clusters are required to interpret this ancient record. Existing dating…
Given the very close proximity of their habitable zones, brown dwarfs represent high-value targets in the search for nearby transiting habitable planets that may be suitable for follow-up occultation spectroscopy. In this paper we develop…
Recent observations point to the presence of structured dust grains in the discs surrounding young brown dwarfs, thus implying that the first stages of planet formation take place also in the sub-stellar regime. Here, we investigate the…
It has been suggested that giant planet occurrence peaks for stars with $M_{\ast}~\approx~3~M_{\odot}$ at a value a factor of 4 higher than observed for solar-mass stars. This population of giant planets predicted to frequently orbit…
We argue that all transient searches for planets in globular clusters have a very low detection probability. Planets of low metallicity stars typically do not reside at small orbital separations. The dependance of planetary system…
White dwarfs with metal pollution are caused by the accretion of rocky dust from tidally disrupted minor bodies and are signposts for planetary systems. These minor bodies are perturbed by planets that have survived post-main sequence…
We discuss our high precision radial velocity results of a sample of 90 M dwarfs observed with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope and the Harlan J. Smith 2.7 m Telescope at McDonald Observatory, as well as the ESO VLT and the Keck I telescopes,…
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…
Identifying planets around O-type and B-type stars is inherently difficult; the most massive known planet host has a mass of only about $3M_{\odot}$. However, planetary systems which survive the transformation of their host stars into white…
Recent gravitational microlensing observations predict a vast population of free-floating giant planets that outnumbers main sequence stars almost twofold. A frequently-invoked mechanism for generating this population is a dynamical…