Motivated by the report of a possible new planetary member of the Solar System, this work calculates cross sections for interactions between passing stars and this proposed Planet Nine. Evidence for the new planet is provided by the orbital alignment of Kuiper Belt objects, and other Solar System properties, which suggest a Neptune-mass object on an eccentric orbit with semimajor axis a9 ≈ 400−...

We present an analysis of the early Kepler observations of the previously discovered transiting planet HAT-P-7b. The light curve shows the transit of the star, the occultation of the planet, and the orbit phase-dependent light from the planet. In addition, phase-dependent light from the star is present, known as “ellipsoidal variations.” The very nearby planet (only four stellar radii away) gra...

We investigate the habitability of the Upsilon Andromedae planetary system as it evolves from a hypothetical four-planet system into what is observed today. We initially considered a fourth planet at a distance of 4.76 AU from the central star. We simulated the dynamics of this system until the fourth planet was ejected due to gravitational interactions with the other planets. Results demonstra...

A planet orbiting in a disk of planetesimals can experience an instability in which it migrates to smaller orbital radii. Resonant interactions between the planet and planetesimals remove angular momentum from the planetesimals, increasing their eccentricities. Subsequently, the planetesimals either collide with or are ejected by the planet, reducing the semimajor axis of the planet. If the sur...

The recent discovery of a Jupiter-mass planet in the close binary star system HD188753 poses a problem for planet formation theory. A circumstellar disk around the planet’s parent star would be truncated at 1.3 AU, leaving little material available for planet formation. In this paper, we attempt to model a disk around HD188753, exploring a range of parameters constrained by observations of prot...

Current plans call for the first Terrestrial Planet Finder mission, TPF-C, to be a monolithic space telescope with a coronagraph for achieving high contrast. The coronagraph removes the diffracted starlight allowing the nearby planet to be detected. In this paper, we present a model of the planet measurement and noise statistics. We utilize this model to develop two planet detection algorithms,...

By analogy with Maxwellian electromagnetic field, the modified gravity for the rotating planet is presented. The theory reasons out the inclined orbit of rotating planet in the solar system, and explains the existence of orbit inclination angle of the planet. When the rotating planet revolves round the sun on the solar equatorial plane, the study yields results consistent with Newtonian gravity...

Five planets are known to orbit the star 55 Cancri. The recently-discovered planet f at 0.78 AU (Fischer et al. 2008) is located at the inner edge of a previously-identified stable zone that separates the three close-in planets from planet d at 5.9 AU. Here we map the stability of the orbital space between planets f and d using a suite of n-body integrations that include an additional, yet-to-b...