Related papers: Upsilon Andromedae: A Rosetta Stone in Planetary D…
The bright F8 V solar-type star upsilon Andromedae has recently been reported to have a system of three planets of Jovian masses. In order to investigate the orbital stability and mutual gravitational interactions among these extrasolar…
Upsilon Andromedae is an F8V star known to have an extrasolar system of at least 3 planets in orbit around it. Here we report the discovery of a low-mass stellar companion to this system. The companion shares common proper motion, lies at a…
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…
The Upsilon Andromedae system is the first exoplanetary system to have the relative inclination of two planets' orbital planes directly measured, and therefore offers our first window into the 3-dimensional configurations of planetary…
We evaluate the orbital evolution and several plausible origins scenarios for the mutually inclined orbits of Upsilon Andromedae c and d. These two planets have orbital elements that oscillate with large amplitudes and lie close to the…
The dynamical interactions of planetary systems may be a clue to their formation histories. Therefore, the distribution of these interactions provides important constraints on models of planet formation. We focus on each system's apsidal…
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…
Planets in extrasolar systems tend to interact such that their orbits lie near a boundary between apsidal libration and circulation, a "separatrix", with one eccentricity periodically reaching near-zero. One explanation, applied to the…
We study the dynamics of the upsilon-Andromedae planetary system proposed by Curiel et al. (2011). We focus on the study of the 3:1 Mean Motion Resonance between upsilon-Andromedae-d and the recently discovered upsilon-Andromedae-e…
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…
Because of the high eccentricities (~0.3) of two of the possible planets about the star Upsilon Andromeda, the stability of the system requires careful study. We present results of 1000 numerical simulations which explore the orbital…
Since the discovery of the first extra-solar planets, we are confronted with the puzzling diversity of planetary systems. Processes like planet radial migration in gas-disks and planetary orbital instabilities, often invoked to explain the…
The orbits of the outer two known planets orbiting Upsilon Andromedae are remarkably eccentric. Planet C possesses an orbital eccentricity of e1 = 0.253. For the more distant planet D, e2 = 0.308. Previous dynamical analyses strongly…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between several giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities would…
Following the groundbreaking discovery of the first extrasolar planet orbiting a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b in 1995, the field of planet formation has become a cornerstone of modern astrophysics. This is in part due to the revelation of an…
We develop a phenomenological theory that aims to account for the origin of the large eccentricities of extrasolar planets and that of the small eccentricities in the solar system, the preference for apsidal alignment in non-resonant…
The three-dimensional secular behavior of a system composed of a central star and two massive planets is modeled semi-analytically in the frame of the general three-body problem. The main dynamical features of the system are presented in…
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…
We introduce a quasi-periodic restricted Hamiltonian to describe the secular motion of a small-mass planet in a multi-planetary system. In particular, we refer to the motion of $\upsilon$-And $b$ which is the innermost planet among those…
The great diversity of extrasolar planetary systems has challenged our understanding of how planets form, and how their orbits evolve as they form. Among the various processes that may account for this diversity, the gravitational…