Related papers: Free Floating or Merely Detached?
Recent imaging campaigns indicate the likely existence of massive planets (~ 1-10 MJ) on ~1000 year orbits about a few percent of stars. Such objects are not easily explained in most current planet formation models. In this Letter we use…
Planet Planet scattering is a leading dynamical mechanism invoked to explain the present orbital distribution of exoplanets. Many stars belong to binary systems, therefore it is important to understand how this mechanism works in presence…
Most young low-mass stars are born as binary systems, and circumstellar disks have recently been observed around the individual components of proto-binary systems (e.g. L1551-IRS5). Thus planets and planetary systems are likely to form…
The nature and origin of free-floating planets (FFPs) are still largely unconstrained because of a lack of large homogeneous samples to enable a statistical analysis of their properties. So far, most FFPs have been discovered using indirect…
Planet-planet scattering is the leading mechanism to explain the large eccentricities of the observed exoplanet population. However, scattering has not been considered important to the production of pairs of planets in mean motion…
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)…
Theories of the formation and early evolution of planetary systems postulate that planets are born in circumstellar disks, and undergo radial migration during and after dissipation of the dust and gas disk from which they formed. The…
Most stars and their planets form in open clusters. Over 95 per cent of such clusters have stellar densities too low (less than a hundred stars per cubic parsec) to withstand internal and external dynamical stresses and fall apart within a…
(Abridged) In planetary systems with two or more giant planets, dynamical instabilities can lead to collisions or ejections through strong planet--planet scattering. Previous studies for simple initial configurations with two equal-mass…
As many as $10^9$ neutron stars populate the Galaxy, but only $\approx 10^3$ are directly observed as pulsars or as accreting sources in X-ray binaries. In principle also the accretion of the interstellar medium may make isolated neutron…
Microlensing observations suggest that the mass distribution of free-floating planets (FFPs) follows a declining power-law with increasing mass. The origin of such distribution is unclear. Using a population synthesis framework, we…
Doppler spectroscopy has detected 136 planets around nearby stars. A major puzzle is why their orbits are highly eccentric, while all planets in our Solar System are on nearly circular orbits, as expected if they formed by accretion…
Secular perturbations from binary stars and distant massive planets can drive cold planets onto nearly parabolic orbits with pericenter passages extremely close to their host stars. Meanwhile, short-period super-Earths are frequently…
Free-floating planets (FFPs) are the lightest products of star formation and they carry important information on the initial conditions of the environment in which they were formed. They were first discovered in the 2000s but still few of…
Exoplanets show a pile-up of Jupiter-size planets in orbits with a 3-day period. A fraction of these hot Jupiters have retrograde orbits with respect to the parent star's rotation. To explain these observations we performed a series of…
Current microlensing surveys are sensitive to free-floating planets down to Earth-mass objects. All published microlensing events attributed to unbound planets were identified based on their short timescale (below two days), but lacked an…
Recent observations have shown the presence of extra-solar planets in Galactic open stellar clusters, as in the Praesepe (M44). These systems provide a favorable environment for planetary formation due to the high heavy-element content…
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,…
In recent years several planets have been discovered at wide orbits (>100 AU) around their host stars. Theoretical studies encounter difficulties in explaining their formation and origin. Here we propose a novel scenario for the production…
As gas giant planets evolve, they may scatter other planets far from their original orbits to produce hot Jupiters or rogue planets that are not gravitationally bound to any star. Here, we consider planets cast out to large orbital…