Related papers: Giant branch systems: surveys and populations

Nearly every star known to host planets will become a white dwarf, and nearly 100 planet-hosts are now known to be accompanied by binary stellar companions. Here, we determine how a binary companion triggers instability in otherwise…

The study of planets beyond the solar system and the search for other habitable planets and life is just beginning. Ground-based (radial velocity and transits) and space-based surveys (transits and astrometry) will identify planets spanning…

White dwarfs, the final evolutionary stage of the vast majority of stars, serve as critical tools for cosmochronology, studies of planetary system evolution, and laboratories for non-standard physics, including exotic cooling channels and…

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…

As a direct result of ongoing efforts to detect more exoplanetary systems, an ever-increasing number of multiple-planet systems are being announced. But how many of these systems are truly what they seem? In many cases, such systems are…

Planet searches around evolved giant stars are bringing new insights to planet formation theories by virtue of the broader stellar mass range of the host stars compared to the solar-type stars that have been the subject of most current…

If we are to develop a comprehensive and predictive theory of galaxy formation and evolution, it is essential that we obtain an accurate assessment of how and when galaxies assemble their stellar populations, and how this assembly varies…

Giant planets have key role in shaping planetary systems. Their composition reveals information on the conditions at which planets form, and their interiors serve as natural laboratories to explore the behavior of materials at extreme…

In about 6 Giga years our Sun will evolve into a red giant and finally end its life as a white dwarf. This stellar metamorphosis will occur to virtually all known host stars of exo-planetary systems and is therefore crucial for their final…

Astronomy is at times a science of unexpected discovery. When it is, and if we are lucky, new intellectual territories emerge to challenge our views of the cosmos. The recent indirect detections using high-precision Doppler spectroscopy of…

There are many competing theories and models describing the formation, migration and evolution of exoplanet systems. As both the precision with which we can characterize exoplanets and their host stars, and the number of systems for which…

Many observed giant planets lie on eccentric orbits. Such orbits could be the result of strong scatterings with other giant planets. The same dynamical instability that produces these scatterings may also cause habitable planets in interior…

Context. Fast rotating red giants in the upper part of the red giant branch have surface velocities that cannot be explained by single star evolution. Aims. We check whether tides between a star and a planet followed by planet engulfment…

In spite of the great effort made in the last decades to improve our understanding of stellar evolution, significant uncertainties still remain due to our poor knowledge of some complex physical processes that still require an empirical…

Recent exoplanet observations reported a large number of multiple-planet systems, in which some of the planets are in a chain of resonances. The fraction of resonant systems to non-resonant systems provides clues about their formation…

We review three main results of our recent study: We show that a proper treatment of the tidal interaction prior to the onset of the common envelope (CE) leads to an enhance mass loss. This might increase the survivability of planets and…

The statistical properties of planets in binaries were investigated. Any difference to planets orbiting single stars can shed light on the formation and evolution of planetary systems. As planets were found around components of binaries…

I review some possible processes by which planets and brown dwarfs can influence the evolution of their parent evolved stars. As sun-like stars evolve on the red giant branch (RGB) and then on the asymptotic giant branch (AGB), they will…

Dwarf galaxies make ideal laboratories to test galaxy evolution paradigms and cosmological models. Detailed studies of dwarfs across the spectrum allow us to gauge the efficacy of astrophysical processes at play in the lowest mass halos…

There are no known examples of magnetic white dwarfs with fields larger than about 3MG paired with a non-degenerate companion in detached binary systems. The suggestion is that highly magnetic, isolated white dwarfs may originate from stars…