Related papers: A sub-Saturn Mass-Radius Desert for Planets with E…
Recent advances have enabled the discovery of a population of potentially Earth-like planets, yet their orbital eccentricity, which governs their climate and provides clues about their origin and dynamical history, is still largely…
Circumplanetary disks can be found around forming giant planets, regardless of whether core accretion or gravitational instability built the planet. We carried out state-of-the-art hydrodynamical simulations of the circumplanetary disks for…
Transiting planet surveys like Kepler have provided a wealth of information on the distribution of planetary radii, particularly for the new populations of super-Earth and sub-Neptune sized planets. In order to aid in the physical…
The observed exoplanet population features a gap in the radius distribution that separates the smaller super-Earths ($\lesssim$1.7 Earth radii) from the larger sub-Neptunes ($\sim$1.7--4 Earth radii). While mass loss theories can explain…
Models of core accretion assume that in the radiative zones of accreting gas envelopes, radiation diffuses. But super-Earths/sub-Neptunes (1-4$R_\oplus$, 2-20$M_\oplus$) point to formation conditions that are optically thin: their modest…
The sizes of small planets have been known to be bi-modal, with a gap separating planets that have lost their primordial atmospheres (super-Earths), and the ones that retain them (mini-Neptunes). Here, we report evidences for another…
Over the last decade, precise exoplanet transmission spectroscopy has revealed the atmospheres of dozens of exoplanets, driven largely by observatories like the Hubble Space Telescope. One major discovery has been the ubiquity of…
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…
The sample of known exoplanets is strongly biased to masses larger than the ones of the giant gaseous planets of the solar system. Recently, the discovery of two extrasolar planets of considerably lower masses around the nearby stars GJ 436…
The Earth, Venus, Mars, and some extrasolar terrestrial planets have a mass and radius that is consistent with a mass fraction of about 30% metallic core and 70% silicate mantle. At the inner frontier of the solar system, Mercury has a…
Terrestrial planets have been found orbiting Sun-like stars with extremely short periods --- some as short as 4 hours. These "ultra-short-period planets" or "hot Earths" are so strongly irradiated that any initial H/He atmosphere has…
We explore the minimum distance from a host star where an exoplanet could potentially be habitable in order not to discard close-in rocky exoplanets for follow-up observations. We find that the inner edge of the Habitable Zone for hot…
The observed exoplanet population exhibits a scarcity of short-period Saturn-mass planets, a phenomenon referred to as the ``hot Saturn desert". This observational scarcity can be utilized to validate the theories regarding the formation…
Close-in super-Earths having radii 1--4 $R_\oplus$ may possess hydrogen atmospheres comprising a few percent by mass of their rocky cores. We determine the conditions under which such atmospheres can be accreted by cores from their parent…
We have computed evolutionary models for extrasolar planets which range in mass from 0.1 to 3.0 Jovian Masses, and which range in equilibrium temperature from 113 K to 2000 K. We present four sequences of models, designed to show the…
From wispy gas giants on the verge of disruption to tiny rocky bodies already falling apart, short-period exoplanets pose a severe puzzle to theories of planet formation and orbital evolution. By far most of the planets known beyond the…
In the last few years astronomical surveys have expanded the reach of planetary science into the realm of small and dense extrasolar worlds. These share a number of characteristics with the terrestrial and icy planetary objects of the Solar…
Despite the identification of a great number of Jupiter-like and Earth-like planets at close-in orbits, the number of "hot Neptunes" - the planets with 0.6-18 times of Neptune mass and orbital periods less than 3 days - turned out to be…
Outward migration of low-mass planets has recently been shown to be a possibility in non-barotropic disks. We examine the consequences of this result in evolutionary models of protoplanetary disks. Planet migration occurs towards…
In this paper we investigate the formation of Uranus and Neptune, according to the core-nucleated accretion model, considering formation locations ranging from 12 to 30 AU from the Sun, and with various disk solid-surface densities and core…