Related papers: Capture and escape in the elliptic restricted thre…
Many of the known extrasolar planets are ``hot Jupiters,'' giant planets with orbital periods of just a few days. We use the observed distribution of hot Jupiters to constrain the location of its inner edge in the mass--period diagram. If…
The hundreds of multiple planetary systems discovered by the \textit{Kepler} mission are typically observed to reside in close-in ($\lesssim0.5$ AU), low-eccentricity, and low-inclination orbits. We run N-body experiments to study the…
Many Sun-like stars are observed to host close-in super-Earths (SEs) as part of a multi-planetary system. In such a system, the spin of the SE evolves due to spin-orbit resonances and tidal dissipation. In the absence of tides, the planet's…
We study the secular effects in the motion of an asteroid with negligible mass in a spatial restricted elliptic three body problem with arbitrary inclination. Averaging over mean anomalies of the asteroid and the planet are applied to…
The most puzzling property of the extrasolar planets discovered by recent radial velocity surveys is their high orbital eccentricities, which are very difficult to explain within our current theoretical paradigm for planet formation.…
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 consider a restricted four-body problem with a precise hierarchy between the bodies: two point-mass bigger bodies, a smaller one with oblate shape, and an infinitesimal body in the neighborhood of the oblate body. The three heavy bodies…
Over two decades of exoplanetology have yielded thousands of discoveries, yet some types of systems are yet to be observed. Circumstellar planets around one star in a binary have been found, but not for tight binaries (< 5 AU).…
To improve our understanding of orbital instabilities in compact planetary systems, we compare suites of $N$-body simulations against numerical integrations of simplified dynamical models. We show that, surprisingly, dynamical models that…
We propose a dynamical mechanism for capturing stars around a massive black hole (MBH), which is based on the accumulation there of a very dense cluster of compact stellar remnants. This study is motivated by the presence of ~10 young…
All of the known circumbinary planets are large (> 3 Earth radii). Whilst observational biases may account for this dearth of small planets, in this paper we propose a theoretical explanation. Most of the known planets are near the…
In previous papers, we developed a technique for estimating the inner eccentricity in hierarchical triple systems, with the inner orbit being initially circular. We considered systems with well separated components and different initial…
A new era of directly imaged extrasolar planets has produced a three-planet system (Marois et al. 2008), where the masses of the planets have been estimated by untested cooling models. We point out that the nominal circular, face-on orbits…
Gaia observations have revealed over a million stellar binary candidates within ~1 kpc of the Sun, predominantly characterized by orbital separations >10^3 AU and eccentricities >0.7. The prevalence of such wide, eccentric binaries has…
There are two planetary formation scenarios: core accretion and gravitational disk instability. Based on the fact that gaseous objects are preferentially observed around metal-rich host stars, most extra-solar gaseous objects discovered to…
Many of the known extrasolar planets are ``hot Jupiters,'' giant planets with orbital periods of just a few days. We use the observed distribution of hot Jupiters to constrain the location of the ``inner edge'' and planet migration theory.…
The detection of exoplanets through direct imaging has produced numerous new positive identifications in recent years. The technique is biased towards planets at wide separations due to the difficulty in removing the stellar signature at…
One of the outstanding problems of classical celestial mechanics was the restricted 3-body prob- lem, in which a planetoid of small mass is subject to the Newtonian attraction of two celestial bodies of large mass, as it occurs, for…
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…
The nonlinear stability domain of Lagrange's celebrated 1772 solution of a three-body problem is obtained numerically as a function of the masses of the bodies and the common eccentricity of their Keplerian orbits. This domain shows that…