Related papers: Repelling Planet pairs by Ping-pong Scattering
We examine the effect of secular perturbations by giant planets on systems of multiple, lower mass planets orbiting Sun-like stars. We simulate the effects of forcing both eccentricity and inclination, separately and together. We compare…
In planetary systems with sufficiently small inter-planet spacing, close encounters can lead to planetary collisions/mergers or ejections. We study the spin property of the merger products of two giant planets in a statistical manner using…
A planet orbiting around a star in a binary system can be ejected if it lies too far from its host star. We find that instability boundaries first obtained in numerical studies can be explained by overlap between sub-resonances within…
The majority of the transiting planets discovered by the Kepler mission (called super-Earths here, includes the so-called 'sub-Neptunes') orbit close to their stars. As such, photoevaporation of their hydrogen envelopes etch sharp features…
Short-period super-Earths and mini-Neptunes encircle more than $\sim50\%$ of Sun-like stars and are relatively amenable to direct observational characterization. Despite this, environments in which these planets accrete are difficult to…
Doppler spectroscopy has detected 136 planets around nearby stars. A major puzzle is why their orbits are highly eccentric, while all planets in our Solar System are on nearly circular orbits, as expected if they formed by accretion…
A number of multiplanet systems are observed to contain planets very close to mean motion resonances, although there is no significant pileup of precise resonance pairs. We present theoretical and numerical studies on the outcome of capture…
Secular resonances in exoplanet systems occur when two or more planets have commensurabilities in the precession rates of their orbital elements, causing an exchange of angular momentum between them. The stellar gravitational quadrupole…
The observed physical clustering of the orbits of small bodies in the distant Kuiper Belt (TNOs) has recently prompted the prediction of an additional planet in the outer solar system. Since the initial posing of the hypothesis, the effects…
The Doppler technique measures the reflex radial motion of a star induced by the presence of companions and is the most successful method to detect exoplanets. If several planets are present, their signals will appear combined in the radial…
Kepler's observation shows that many of the detected planets are super-Earths. They are inside a range of critical masses overlapping the core masses (2-20 $M_{\bigoplus}$), which would trigger the runaway accretion and develop the gas…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…
Pairs of migrating extrasolar planets often lock into mean motion resonance as they drift inward. This paper studies the convergent migration of giant planets (driven by a circumstellar disk) and determines the probability that they are…
Planet-planet scattering best explains the eccentricity distribution of extrasolar giant planets. Past literature showed that the orbits of planets evolve due to planet-planet scattering. This work studies the spin evolution of planets in…
Most major planetary bodies in the solar system rotate in the same direction as their orbital motion: their spin is prograde. Theoretical studies to explain the direction as well as the magnitude of the spin vector have had mixed success.…
Planetary systems with sufficiently small orbital spacings can experience planetary mergers and ejections. The branching ratio of mergers vs ejections depends sensitively on the treatment of planetary close encounters. Previous works have…
Solar system planets move on almost circular orbits. In strong contrast, many massive gas giant exoplanets travel on highly elliptical orbits, whereas the shape of the orbits of smaller, more terrestrial, exoplanets remained largely…
We seek to characterize giant-planet systems by their gravitational scattering properties. We do this to a given system by integrating it numerically along with a large number of hypothetical small bodies that are initially in eccentric…
Planets with several Earth masses and a few day orbital periods have been discovered through radial velocity and transit surveys. Regardless of their formation mechanism, a key evolution issue is the efficiency of their retention near their…
The radius-period distribution of exoplanets has been characterized by the \textit{Kepler} survey, and the empirical mass-radius relation by the subset of \textit{Kepler} planets with mass measurements. We combine the two in order to…