相关论文: Tilting Jupiter (a bit) and Saturn (a lot) During …
Knowledge of an exoplanet's oblateness and obliquity would give clues about its formation and internal structure. In principle, a light curve of a transiting planet bears information about the planet's shape, but previous work has shown…
Jupiter and Saturn play host to an impressive array of satellites, making it reasonable to suspect that similar systems of moons might exist around giant extrasolar planets. Furthermore, a significant population of such planets is known to…
The degree of alignment between a star's spin axis and the orbital plane of its planets (the stellar obliquity) is related to interesting and poorly understood processes that occur during planet formation and evolution. Hot Jupiters…
Recent works on planetary migration show that the orbital structure of the Kuiper belt can be very well reproduced if before the onset of the planetary instability Neptune underwent a long-range planetesimal-driven migration up to $\sim$28…
The obliquity of a star, or the angle between its spin axis and the average orbit normal of its companion planets, provides a unique constraint on that system's evolutionary history. Unlike the Solar System, where the Sun's equator is…
The discovery of Jupiter-mass planets in close orbits about their parent stars has challenged models of planet formation. Recent observations have shown that a number of these planets have highly inclined, sometimes retrograde orbits about…
Tidal dissipation inside giant planets is important for the orbital evolution of their natural satellites. It is conventionally treated by parameterized equilibrium tidal theory, in which the tidal torque declines rapidly with distance, and…
When a hot Jupiter orbits a star whose effective temperature exceeds $\sim$6100 K, its orbit normal tends to be misaligned with the stellar spin axis. Cooler stars typically have smaller obliquities, which may have been damped by hot…
(Abridged) The solar system gas giant planets are oblate due to their rapid rotation. A measurement of the planet's projected oblateness would constrain the planet's rotational period. Planets that are synchronously rotating with their…
The turbulent environment from which stars form may lead to misalignment between the stellar spin and the remnant protoplanetary disk. By using hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic simulations, we demonstrate that a wide range of stellar…
We present new results related to the coupled evolution of a two giant planet system embedded in a protoplanetary disk, in which a Saturn mass protoplanet is trapped in an outer mean motion resonance with a Jupiter mass protoplanet. The…
Natural satellite systems present a large variety of orbital configurations in the solar system. While some are clearly the result of known processes, others still have largely unexplained eccentricity and inclination values. Iapetus has a…
Tidal interactions between moons and planets can have major effects on the orbits, spins, and thermal evolution of the moons. In the Saturn system, tidal dissipation in the planet transfers angular momentum from Saturn to the moons, causing…
We use the current orbital structure of large (>50km) asteroids in the main asteroid belt to constrain the evolution of the giant planets when they migrated from their primordial orbits to their current ones. Minton & Malhotra (2009) showed…
Orbits of known extrasolar planets that are located outside the tidal circularization regions of their parent stars are often substantially eccentric. By contrast, planetary orbits in our Solar System are approximately circular, reflecting…
Recent analyses have revealed a mystery. The orbital period of the highly inflated hot Jupiter, WASP-12b, is decreasing rapidly. The rate of inspiral, however, is too fast to be explained by either eccentricity tides or equilibrium stellar…
We study orbital inclination changes associated with the precession of a disc-planet system that occurs through gravitational interaction with a binary companion on an inclined orbit. We investigate whether this scenario can account for…
In this paper we investigate the evolution of a pair of interacting planets - a Jupiter mass planet and a Super-Earth with the 5.5 Earth masses - orbiting a Solar type star and embedded in a gaseous protoplanetary disc. We focus on the…
Recent works suggest that, in multiplanetary systems, a close-in exoplanet can sometimes avoid becoming tidally locked to its host star if it is captured into a secular spin-orbit resonance with a companion planet. In such a resonance, the…
For most hot Jupiters around main-sequence Sun-like stars, tidal torques are expected to transfer angular momentum from the planet's orbit to the star's rotation. The timescale for this process is difficult to calculate, leading to…