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Context. The discovery of about 700 extrasolar planets, so far, has lead to the first statistics concerning extrasolar planets. The presence of giant planets seems to depend on stellar metallicity and mass. For example, they are more…
Planet formation occurs around a wide range of stellar masses and stellar system architectures. An improved understanding of the formation process can be achieved by studying it across the full parameter space, particularly toward the…
Planets that revolve around a binary pair of stars are known as circumbinary planets. The orbital motion of the stars around their center of mass causes a periodic variation in the total instellation incident upon a circumbinary planet.…
A decade ago, the detection of the first transiting extrasolar planet provided a direct constraint on its composition and opened the door to spectroscopic investigations of extrasolar planetary atmospheres. As such characterization studies…
The discovery of planets around massive stars is important for understanding how planet formation and evolution is conditioned by different stellar environments. However, current planetary search surveys have failed to detect planets around…
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)…
We reconsider the commonly held assumption that warm debris disks are tracers of terrestrial planet formation. The high occurrence rate inferred for Earth-mass planets around mature solar-type stars based on exoplanet surveys (roughly 20%)…
Precision infrared photometry from Spitzer has enabled the first direct studies of light from extrasolar planets, via observations at secondary eclipse in transiting systems. Current Spitzer results include the first longitudinal…
The discovery of planetary systems outside of the solar system has challenged some of the tenets of planetary formation. Among the difficult-to-explain observations, are systems with a giant planet orbiting a very-low mass star, such as the…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…
Small planets, 1-4x the size of Earth, are extremely common around Sun-like stars, and surprisingly so, as they are missing in our solar system. Recent detections have yielded enough information about this class of exoplanets to begin…
Previous work has established the enhanced occurrence of compact systems of multiple small exoplanets around metal-poor stars. Understanding the origin of this effect in the planet formation process is a topic of ongoing research. Here we…
High-contrast adaptive optics imaging is a powerful technique to probe the architectures of planetary systems from the outside-in and survey the atmospheres of self-luminous giant planets. Direct imaging has rapidly matured over the past…
A measurement by microlensing of the planetary mass function of planets with masses ranging from 5M_E to 10M_J and orbital radii from 0.5 to 10 AU was reported recently. A strategy for extending the mass range down to (1-3)M_E is proposed…
Massive giant planets, such as the ones being discovered by direct imaging surveys, likely experience the majority of their growth through a circumplanetary disc. We argue that the entropy of accreted material is determined by boundary…
As stars evolve, they undergo significant changes in their physical properties, which can have a profound impact on the planets orbiting them. In particular, the mass lost through stellar wind may be partially accreted by orbiting planets.…
The research of exoplanets has entered an era in which we characterize extrasolar planets. This has become possible with measurements of radii and luminosities. Meanwhile, radial velocity surveys discover also very low-mass planets. Uniting…
Models are developed to simulate lightcurves of stars dimmed by transiting exoplanets with and without rings. These models are then applied to \textit{Kepler} photometry to search for planetary rings in a sample of 21 exoplanets, mostly hot…
We use nearly 20 years of photometry obtained by the OGLE survey to measure the occurrence rate of wide-orbit (or ice giant) microlensing planets, i.e., with separations from ~5 AU to ~15 AU and mass-ratios from $10^{-4}$ to 0.033. In a…
The formation of a circumplanetary disk and accretion of angular momentum onto a protoplanetary system are investigated using 3D hydrodynamical simulations. The local region around a protoplanet in a protoplanetary disk is considered with…