Related papers: On the low-mass planethood criterion
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…
In the past 15 years, astronomers have revealed that a significant fraction of the stars should harbor planets and that it is likely that terrestrial planets are abundant in our galaxy. Among these planets, how many are habitable, i.e.…
With planets orbiting stars, a planetary mass function should not be seen as a low-mass extension of the stellar mass function, but a proper formalism needs to take care of the fact that the statistical properties of planet populations are…
The extreme conditions in the early stages of planetary evolution are thought to shape its subsequent development. High internal temperatures from giant impacts can provide sufficient energy to drive extreme volatile loss, with hydrogen…
We review the progresses made in global theoretical models of planetary system formation in the last decade using the example of the planetary system formation framework known as the Bern Model that has been continuously developed since…
The incidence of planetary systems orbiting red dwarf stars with masses less than 0.4 solar masses provides a crucial observational test for the Self-Similar Cosmological paradigm. The discrete self-similarity of the paradigm mandates the…
Recent ALMA observations have identified a variety of dust gaps in protoplanetary disks, which are commonly interpreted to be generated by unobserved planets. Predicting mass of such embedded planets is of fundamental importance in…
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.…
Stellar occultations and transits occur when a planetary body passes in front of a star (including our Sun). For objects with an atmosphere, refraction plays an essential role to explain the drops of flux and the aureoles observed during…
Exact and approximate analytical formulas are derived for the internal structure and global parameters of the spherical non-rotating quasi-incompressible planet. The planet is modeled by a polytrope with a small polytropic index n << 1, and…
This short article provides brief coverage of the planetary boundary layer (PBL) and some characteristics featuring this lowest part of the atmosphere. Any readers who are interested in deeper and more extensive coverage are encouraged to…
We present initial work about attaining fitting formulas for the quick determination of the existence of S-type and P-type habitable zones in binary systems. Following previous work, we calculate the limits of the climatological habitable…
The distribution of a pure condensible planetary atmosphere in equilibrium with a surface reservoir is revisited employing the energy budget of the climate system, emphasizing the atmospheric horizontal latent heat transport. This…
We derive a version of the virial theorem that is applicable to diatomic planetary atmospheres that are in approximate thermal equilibrium at moderate temperatures and pressures and are sufficiently thin such that the gravitational…
The gap between two component debris disks is often taken to be carved by intervening planets scattering away the remnant planetesimals. We employ N-body simulations to determine how the time needed to clear the gap depends on the location…
Atmospheric mass loss is a fundamental phenomenon shaping the structure and evolution of planetary atmospheres. It can engage processes ranging from global interactions with the host star and large-scale hydrodynamic outflows to essentially…
A nontrivial topology of the spatial section of the universe is an observable, which can be probed for all locally homogeneous and isotropic universes, without any assumption on the cosmological density parameters. We discuss how one can…
Low-mass planets have an extraordinarily diverse range of bulk compositions, from primarily rocky worlds to those with deep gaseous atmospheres. As techniques for measuring the masses of exoplanets are advancing the field towards the…
Inferring planetary parameters from transit timing variations is challenging for small exoplanets because their transits may be so weak that determination of individual transit timing is difficult or impossible. We implement a useful…
We use PyDynamicaLC, a model using the least number of, and the least correlated, degrees of freedom needed to derive a photodynamical model, to describe some of the smallest -- and lowest TTV (transit timing variations) amplitude -- of the…