Related papers: Repelling Planet pairs by Ping-pong Scattering
Before an exoplanet transit, atmospheric refraction bends light into the line of sight of an observer. The refracted light forms a stellar mirage, a distorted secondary image of the host star. I model this phenomenon and the resultant…
Several families of irregular moons orbit the giant planets. These moons are thought to have been captured into planetocentric orbits after straying into a region in which the planet's gravitation dominates solar perturbations (the Hill…
The origin of rings around giant planets remains elusive. Saturn's rings are massive and made of 90-95% of water ice. In contrast, the much less massive rings of Uranus and Neptune are dark and likely to have higher rock fraction. Here we…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between multiple giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities seem…
Context. Findings by the Helios and STEREO mission have indicated the presence of a resonant circumsolar ring of dust associated with Venus. Attempts to model this phenomenon as an analogue to the resonant ring of Earth - as a result of…
Extreme Scattering Events are radio-wave lensing events caused by AU-sized concentrations of ionised gas. Although they were discovered more than a decade ago we still have no clear picture of the physical nature of the lenses. To…
Trends in the planet population with host star mass provide an avenue to constrain planet formation theories. We derive the planet radius distribution function for Kepler stars of different spectral types, sampling a range in host star…
Humans will launch spacecraft that travel at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Spacecraft traffic will be tracked by radar. Scattering of pulsed electromagnetic fields by an object in uniform translational motion at…
The Solar System includes two planets --- Mercury and Mars --- significantly less massive than Earth, and all evidence indicates that planets of similar size orbit many stars. In fact, one of the first exoplanets to be discovered is a…
The Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect is the distortion of stellar spectral lines that occurs during eclipses or transits, due to stellar rotation. We assess the future prospects for using the RM effect to measure the alignment of planetary…
Doppler planet searches revealed that many giant planets orbit close to their host star or in highly eccentric orbits. These and subsequent observations inspired new theories of planet formation that invoke gravitation interactions in…
Recent observations have revealed two new classes of planetary orbits. Rossiter- Mclaughlin (RM) measurements have revealed hot Jupiters in high-obliquity orbits. In addition, direct-imaging has discovered giant planets at large (~ 100 AU)…
All of the known circumbinary planets are large (> 3 Earth radii). Whilst observational biases may account for this dearth of small planets, in this paper we propose a theoretical explanation. Most of the known planets are near the…
If mutual gravitational scattering among exoplanets occurs, then it may produce unique orbital properties. For example, two-planet systems that lie near the boundary between circulation and libration of their periapses could result if…
Recent work has shown that the planets in the $Kepler$ Mission's population of multi-transiting systems show surprising uniformity in both mass and radius. In this brief note, I show that this intra-system mass uniformity extends to…
We investigate the general interaction between an eccentric planet and a coplanar debris disc of the same mass, using analytical theory and n-body simulations. Such an interaction could result from a planet-planet scattering or merging…
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…
Due to fortuitous circumstances, the two giant planets around Kepler-419 have well characterized 3-D orbits. They are nearly coplanar to each other; the inner one has a large eccentricity (~0.82); and the apses of the two orbits librate…
In the nucleated instability picture of gas giant formation, the final stage is the rapid accretion of a massive gas envelope by a solid core, bringing about a tenfold or more increase in mass. This tends to trigger the scattering of any…
Multiple studies have shown that planet-planet scattering plays an important role in the dynamical evolution of planetary systems. For instance, it has been shown that planet-planet scattering can reproduce the eccentricity distribution of…