Related papers: Dynamical Instabilities in Extrasolar Planetary Sy…
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…
The known extrasolar multiple-planet systems share a surprising dynamical attribute: they cluster just beyond the Hill stability boundary. Here we show that the planet-planet scattering model, which naturally explains the observed exoplanet…
Orbits of known extrasolar planets that are located outside the tidal circularization regions of their parent stars are often substantially eccentric. By contrast, planetary orbits in our Solar System are approximately circular, reflecting…
We show that interaction with a gas disk may produce young planetary systems with closely-spaced orbits, stabilized by mean-motion resonances between neighbors. On longer timescales, after the gas is gone, interaction with a remnant…
The orbital distributions of currently observed extrasolar giant planets allow marginally stable orbits for hypothetical, terrestrial planets. In this paper, we propose that many of these systems may not have additional planets on these…
Planetary systems with more than two bodies will experience orbital crossings at a time related to the initial orbital separations of the planets. After a crossing, the system enters a period of chaotic evolution ending in the reshaping of…
In a recent paper we proposed that the giant planets' primordial orbits may have been eccentric (~0.05), and used a suite of dynamical simulations to show outcomes of the giant planet instability that are consistent with their present-day…
With more than 260 extrasolar planetary systems discovered to-date, the search for habitable planets has found new grounds. Unlike our solar system, the stars of many of these planets are hosts to eccentric or close-in giant bodies. Several…
Gravitational scattering between massive planets has been invoked to explain the eccentricity distribution of extrasolar planets. For scattering to occur, the planets must either form in -- or migrate into -- an unstable configuration. In…
Understanding the formation and dynamical evolution of habitable planets in extrasolar planetary systems is a challenging task. In this respect, systems with multiple giant planets and/or multiple stars present special complications. The…
We develop an idealized dynamical model to predict the typical properties of outer extrasolar planetary systems, at radii beyond 5 AU. Our hypothesis is that dynamical evolution in outer planetary systems is controlled by a combination of…
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…
The modestly eccentric and non-coplanar orbits of the giant planets pose a challenge to solar system formation theories which generally indicate that the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk in nearly perfectly circular and…
We study how close-in systems such as those detected by Kepler are affected by the dynamics of bodies in the outer system. We consider two scenarios: outer systems of giant planets potentially unstable to planet--planet scattering, and wide…
The majority of star formation results in binaries or higher multiple systems, and planets in such systems are constrained to a limited range of orbital parameters in order to remain stable against perturbations from stellar companions.…
A widely considered characteristic of extra-solar planetary systems has been a seeming tendency for major axes of adjacent orbits to librate in stable configurations. Based on a new catalog of extra-solar planets (Butler et al. 2006) and…
The ubiquity of planets and diversity of planetary systems reveal planet formation encompass many complex and competing processes. In this series of papers, we develop and upgrade a population synthesis model as a tool to identify the…
Many exoplanets in close-in orbits are observed to have relatively high eccentricities and large stellar obliquities. We explore the possibility that these result from planet-planet scattering by studying the dynamical outcomes from a large…
Physical collisions and close approaches between stars play an important role in the formation of exotic stellar systems. Standard theories suggest that collisions are rare, occurring only via random encounters between stars in dense…
We explore the evolution of a giant planet that interacts with a circumbinary disc that orbits a misaligned binary by means of analytic models and hydrodynamical simulations. Planet-disc interactions lead to mutual tilt oscillations between…