Related papers: Surrounded by Giants: Habitable Zone Stability Wit…
In the Solar System, minor bodies and dust deliver various materials to planetary surfaces. Several exoplanetary systems are known to host inner and outer belts, analogues of the main asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. We study the…
We study the stability of systems of three giant planets orbiting 3 - 8 M_Sol stars at orbital distances of >10 au as the host star ages through the Main Sequence (MS) and well into the White Dwarf (WD) stage. Systems are stable on the MS…
Direct imaging searches have begun to detect planetary and brown dwarf companions and to place constraints on the presence of giant planets at large separations from their host star. This work helps to motivate such planet searches by…
More than 450 exoplanets have currently been detected, most of them by the radial velocity (RV) technique. While the majority of exoplanets have been found around main-sequence (MS) FGK stars (M 1.5M*), only a small fraction (- 10%) have…
A stellar evolution computer model has been used to determine changes in the luminosity L and effective temperature T(e) of single stars during their time on the main sequence. The range of stellar masses investigated was from 0.5 to 1.5…
The presence of giant planets influences potentially habitable worlds in numerous ways. Massive celestial neighbors can facilitate the formation of planetary cores and modify the influx of asteroids and comets towards Earth-analogs later…
Planetary systems with multiple giant planets provide important opportunities to study planetary formation and evolution. The HD 45364 system hosts two giant planets that reside within the Habitable Zone (HZ) of their host star and was the…
Exoplanetary systems exhibit a broad range of architectures which, in turn, enable a variety of dynamical environments. Many of the known planetary systems do not transit the host star, and so we measure the minimum masses of their planets,…
Recent work has suggested that many planetary systems lie near instability. If all systems are near instability, an additional planet must exist in stable regions of well-separated extra-solar planetary systems to push these systems to the…
Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…
There are numerous multi-planet systems that have now been detected via a variety of techniques. These systems exhibit a range of both planetary properties and orbital configurations. For those systems without detected planetary transits, a…
Many features of the outer solar system are replicated in numerical simulations if the giant planets undergo an orbital instability that ejects one or more ice giants. During this instability, Jupiter and Saturn's orbits diverge, crossing…
Close-in giant planets are thought to have formed in the cold outer regions of planetary systems and migrated inward, passing through the orbital parameter space occupied by the terrestrial planets in our own Solar System. We present…
Giant, wide-separation planets often lie in the gap between multiple, distinct rings of circumstellar debris: this is the case for the HR\,8799 and HD\,95086 systems, and even the solar system where the Asteroid and Kuiper belts enclose the…
In the near future we will have ground- and space-based telescopes that are designed to observe and characterize Earth-like planets. While attention is focused on exoplanets orbiting main sequence stars, more than 150 exoplanets have…
In this work is investigated the possibility of close-binary star systems having Earth-size planets within their habitable zones. First, we selected all known close-binary systems with confirmed planets (totaling 22 systems) to calculate…
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…
The discovery of planetary systems beyond the solar system has revealed a diversity of architectures, most of which differ significantly from our system. The initial detection of an exoplanet is often followed by subsequent discoveries…
Nearly half of the exoplanets found within binary star systems reside in very wide binaries with average stellar separations beyond 1,000 AU (1 AU being the Earth-Sun distance), yet the influence of such distant binary companions on…
Giant gaseous planets often reside on orbits in sufficient proximity to their host stars for the planetary quadrupole gravitational field to become non-negligible. In presence of an additional planetary companion, a precise characterization…