Related papers: Influence of massive planet scattering on nascent …
Approximately half of the planets discovered by NASA's Kepler mission are in systems where just a single planet transits its host star, and the remaining planets are observed to be in multi-planet systems. Recent analyses have reported a…
Planet--Planet scattering is an efficient and robust dynamical mechanism for producing eccentric exoplanets. Coupled to tidal interactions with the central star, it can also explain close--in giant planets on circularized and potentially…
The late phases of the orbital evolution of an Earth-like planet around a Sun-like star are revisited considering the effect of the density fluctuations associated with convective motions inside the star. Such fluctuations produce a random…
The discovery of over 200 extrasolar planets with the radial velocity (RV) technique has revealed that many giant planets have large eccentricities, in striking contrast with most of the planets in the solar system and prior theories of…
Many features of the outer solar system are replicated in numerical simulations if the giant planets undergo an orbital instability that ejects one or more ice giants. During this instability, Jupiter and Saturn's orbits diverge, crossing…
The discovery of many exoplanets has revealed an incredible diversity of orbital architectures. These orbital configurations are intrinsically linked to the potential for habitable environments within the system, since the gravitational…
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 determine the orbital eccentricities of individual small Kepler planets, through a combination of asteroseismology and transit light-curve analysis. We are able to constrain the eccentricities of 51 systems with a single transiting…
Several stars show deep transits consistent with discs of roughly 1 Solar radius seen at moderate inclinations, likely surrounding planets on eccentric orbits. We show that this configuration arises naturally as a result of planet-planet…
Compared to the giant planets in the solar system, exoplanets have many remarkable properties such as the prevalence of giant planets on eccentric orbits and the presence of hot Jupiters. Planet-planet scattering (PPS) between giant planets…
Earth-sized planets were observed in close-in orbits around M dwarfs. While more and more planets are expected to be uncovered around M dwarfs, theories of their formation and dynamical evolution are still in their infancy. We investigate…
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…
In the standard formation models of terrestrial planets in the solar system and close-in super-Earths in non-resonant orbits recently discovered by exoplanet observations, planets are formed by giant impacts of protoplanets or planetary…
Models of planet formation have shown that giant planets have a large impact on the number, masses and orbits of terrestrial planets that form. In addition, they play an important role in delivering volatiles from material that formed…
The high eccentricities of the known extrasolar planets remain largely unexplained. We explore the possibility that eccentricities are excited in the outer parts of an extended planetary disk by encounters with stars passing at a few…
Terrestrial planets are thought to be the result of a vast number of gravitational interactions and collisions between smaller bodies. We use numerical simulations to show that practically identical initial conditions result in a wide array…
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.…
Gas giants orbiting interior to the ice line are thought to have been displaced from their formation locations by processes that remain debated. Here we uncover several new metallicity trends, which together may indicate that two competing…
We present a statistical study of the post-formation migration of giant planets in a range of initial disk conditions. For given initial conditions we model the evolution of giant planet orbits under the influence of disk, stellar, and mass…
The extrasolar planets discovered to date possess unexpected orbital elements. Most orbit their host stars with larger eccentricities and smaller semi-major axes than similarly sized planets in our own solar system do. It is generally…