Related papers: Free Floating or Merely Detached?
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…
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…
The discovery of numerous free-floating planets (FFPs) has intensified interest in their origins and dynamical histories. A leading formation mechanism is planet-planet scatterings in unstable multi-planetary systems, which can naturally…
We find that free-floating planets can remain bound to a star cluster for much longer than was previously assumed: of the order of the cluster half-mass relaxation timescale as opposed to the crossing-time. This result is based on N-body…
We have simulated encounters between planetary systems and single stars in various clustered environments. This allows us to estimate the fraction of systems liberated, the velocity distribution of the liberated planets, and the separation…
Recent detections of extremely short-timescale microlensing events imply the existence of a large population of Earth- to Neptune-mass planets that appear to have no host stars. However, it is currently unknown whether these objects are…
Free-floating planets are a new class of planets recently discovered. These planets don't orbit within stellar systems, instead living a nomadic life within the galaxy. How such objects formed remains elusive. Numerous works have explored…
The Milky way Galaxy is brimming with free-floating objects, including stars, planets and planetesimals. For the purpose of this chapter, we define a free-floating object as a solid body that is not orbited by a considerably more massive…
Planets are thought to form via accretion from a remnant disk of gas and solids around a newly formed star. During this process material in the disk either remains bound to the star as part of either a planet, a smaller celestial body, or…
The ejection of planets by the instability of planetary systems is a potential source of free-floating planets. We numerically simulate multi-planet systems to study the evolution process, the properties of surviving systems, and the…
A large sample of planet-planet scattering events for three planet systems with different orbital separations and masses is analyzed with a multiple regression model. The dependence of the time for the onset of instability on the masses of…
Evidence of exoplanets with orbits that are misaligned with the spin of the host star may suggest that not all bound planets were born in the protoplanetary disk of their current planetary system. Observations have shown that free-floating…
The discovery of Jupiter-mass planets in close orbits about their parent stars has challenged models of planet formation. Recent observations have shown that a number of these planets have highly inclined, sometimes retrograde orbits about…
Planet-planet scattering is the leading mechanism to explain the broad eccentricity distribution of observed giant exoplanets. Here we study the orbital stability of primordial giant planet moons in this scenario. We use N-body simulations…
The recent discovery of free-floating planets and their theoretical interpretation as celestial bodies, either condensed independently or ejected from parent stars in tight clusters, introduced an intriguing possibility. Namely, that some…
The dominant mechanism for generating free-floating planets has so far remained elusive. One suggested mechanism is that planets are ejected from planetary systems due to planet-planet interactions. However, instability around a single star…
Among the methods proposed to detect extrasolar planets, microlensing is the only technique that can detect free-floating planets. Free-floating planets are detected through the channel of short-duration isolated lensing events. However, if…
Most known extrasolar planets (exoplanets) have been discovered using the radial velocity$^{\bf 1,2}$ or transit$^{\bf 3}$ methods. Both are biased towards planets that are relatively close to their parent stars, and studies find that…
Wide-orbit exoplanets are starting to be detected, and planetary formation models are under development to understand their properties. We propose a population of "Oort" planets around other stars, forming by a mechanism analogous to how…
The number of exoplanets detected using gravitational microlensing technique is currently larger than 200, which enables population studies. Microlensing is uniquely sensitive to low-mass planets orbiting at separations of several…