Related papers: Planetary Obliquity Excitation Through Pre-Main Se…
We explore the effects of seasonal variability for the climate of Earth-like planets as determined by the two parameters polar obliquity and orbital eccentricity using a general circulation model of intermediate complexity. In the first…
Compact binaries with orbital periods shorter than about 7 days show an absence of transiting planets, a feature known as the ``circumbinary planet desert". The physical mechanism behind this desert remains unclear. We investigate its…
Synchronously orbiting, tidally-locked exoplanets with a dayside facing their star and a permanently dark nightside orbiting dim stars are prime candidates for habitability. Simulations of these planets often show the potential to maintain…
In close two-body astrophysical systems, such as binary stars or Hot Jupiter systems, tidal interactions often drive dynamical evolution on secular timescales. Many host stars and presumably giant gaseous planets feature a convective…
It is a long-standing question in exoplanet research if Hot Jupiters can influence the magnetic activity of their host stars. While cool stars usually spin down with age and become inactive, an input of angular momentum through tidal…
Stellar obliquity, the angle between a planet's orbital axis and its host star's spin axis, traces the formation and evolution of a planetary system. In transiting exoplanet observations, only the sky-projected stellar obliquity can be…
Knowledge of an exoplanet's oblateness and obliquity would give clues about its formation and internal structure. In principle, a light curve of a transiting planet bears information about the planet's shape, but previous work has shown…
Gas giant planets have been detected on eccentric orbits several hundreds of astronomical units in size around other stars. It has been proposed that even the Sun hosts a wide-orbit planet of 5-10 Earth masses, often called Planet Nine,…
It was believed until very recently that a near-equatorial satellite would always keep up with the planet's equator (with oscillations in inclination, but without a secular drift). As explained in Efroimsky and Goldreich (2004), this…
In a multi-planet system, a gradual change in one planet's semi-major axis will affect the eccentricities of all the planets, as angular momentum is distributed via secular interactions. If tidal dissipation in the planet is the cause of…
The obliquity of a planet is the tilt between its equator and its orbital plane. Giant planets are expected to form with near-zero obliquities. After its formation, some dynamical mechanism must therefore have tilted Saturn up to its…
Excitation of solar oscillations is attribued to turbulent motions in the solar convective zone. It is also currently believed that oscillations of low massive stars (M <2 Mo) - which possess an upper convective zone - are stochastically…
Turbulent friction in convective regions in stars and planets is one of the key physical mechanisms that drive the dissipation of the kinetic energy of tidal flows in their interiors and the evolution of their systems. This friction acts…
Circumbinary planets (CBPs) currently identified are in nearly coplanar configurations relative to their host binaries, yet the dynamical origin of this preference remains unclear. We investigate this question by simulating the secular…
The existence of planets born in environments highly perturbed by a stellar companion represents a major challenge to the paradigm of planet formation. In numerical simulations, the presence of a close binary companion stirs up the relative…
We investigate induced oscillations by the gravitational field of a fast stellar object, such as a neutron star or a black-hole in a near miss collision with another star. Non-adiabatic collision conditions may lead to large amplitude…
Recent work has demonstrated that exoplanetary system properties correlate strongly with ambient stellar clustering in six-dimensional stellar position-velocity phase space, quantified by dividing planetary systems into sub-samples with…
Recent observations have shown that at least some close-in exoplanets maintain eccentric orbits despite tidal circularization timescales that are typically shorter than stellar ages. We explore gravitational interactions with a distant…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing of the giant planets, can be explained if planets radially migrated by exchanging orbital energy and momentum with outer disk planetesimals. Neptune's…
Two formation scenarios have been proposed to explain the tight orbits of hot Jupiters. They could be formed in orbits with a small inclination (with respect to the stellar spin) via disk migration, or in more highly inclined orbits via…