Related papers: Exomoons of Circumbinary Planets
Circumbinary Planets (CBPs) can be misaligned with their host binary stars. Orbital dynamics, simulations, and recent observations of proto-planetary disks all suggest that the planet can stably orbit in a plane perpendicular to that of an…
The majority of the discovered transiting circumbinary planets are located very near the innermost stable orbits permitted, raising questions about the origins of planets in such perturbed environments. Most favored formation scenarios…
We formulated tidal decay lifetimes for hypothetical moons orbiting extrasolar planets with both lunar and stellar tides. Previous work neglected the effect of lunar tides on planet rotation, and are therefore applicable only to systems in…
With the detection of extrasolar moons (exomoons) on the horizon, it is important to consider their potential for habitability. If we consider the circumstellar Habitable Zone (HZ, often described in terms of planet semi-major axis and…
To date, several exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars with close binary companions (a~<30 AU). The fact that planets can form in these dynamically challenging environments implies that planet formation must be a robust process.…
The existence of planets orbiting a central binary star system immediately raises questions regarding their formation and dynamical evolution. Recent discoveries of circumbinary planets by the Kepler space telescope has shown that some of…
Exoplanets number in their thousands, and the number is ever increasing with the advent of new surveys and improved instrumentation. One of the most surprising things we have learnt from these discoveries is not that small-rocky planets in…
The distribution of exoplanet masses is not primordial. After the initial stage of planet formation is complete, the gravitational interactions between planets can lead to the physical collision of two planets, or the ejection of one or…
Planet obliquity is the alignment or misalignment of a planet spin axis relative to its orbit normal. In a multiplanet system, this obliquity is a valuable signature of planet formation and evolutionary history. The young $\beta$ Pictoris…
Planetary migration poses a serious challenge to theories of planet formation. In gaseous and planetesimal disks, migration can remove planets as quickly as they form. To explore migration in a planetesimal disk, we combine analytic and…
Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the formation process of satellite systems, and relatively large moons are thought to be born in circumplanetary disks. Making a single-moon system is known to be more difficult than…
We examined which exo-systems contain moons that may be detected in transit. We numerically modeled transit light curves of Earth-like and giant planets that cointain moons with 0.005--0.4 Earth-mass. The orbital parameters were randomly…
The discovery of transiting circumbinary planets by the Kepler mission suggests that planets can form efficiently around binary stars. None of the stellar binaries currently known to host planets has a period shorter than 7 days, despite…
The origin of hot Jupiters -- gas giant exoplanets orbiting very close to their host stars -- is a long-standing puzzle. Planet formation theories suggest that such planets are unlikely to have formed in-situ but instead may have formed at…
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…
From analytical studies of tidal heating, eclipses and planetary illumination, it is clear that the exomoon habitable zone (EHZ) - the set of moon and host planet orbits that permit liquid water on an Earthlike moon's surface - is a…
We simulate the coupled stellar and tidal evolution of short-period binary stars (orbital period $P_{orb} \lsim$8 days) to investigate the orbital oscillations, instellation cycles, and orbital stability of circumbinary planets (CBPs). We…
In this paper we investigate the detectability of a habitable-zone exomoon around various configurations of exoplanetary systems with the Kepler Mission or photometry of approximately equal quality. We calculate both the predicted transit…
Mounting discoveries of extrasolar planets orbiting post-main sequence stars motivate studies aimed at understanding the fate of these planets. In the traditional "adiabatic" approximation, a secondary's eccentricity remains constant during…
With $n$-body simulations we investigate the stability of tilted circumbinary planetary systems consisting of two nonzero mass planets. The planets are initially in circular orbits that are coplanar to each other, as would be expected if…