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Published November 2013 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Solar System Moons as Analogs for Compact Exoplanetary Systems

Abstract

The field of exoplanetary science has experienced a recent surge of new systems that is largely due to the precision photometry provided by the Kepler mission. The latest discoveries have included compact planetary systems in which the orbits of the planets all lie relatively close to the host star, which presents interesting challenges in terms of formation and dynamical evolution. The compact exoplanetary systems are analogous to the moons orbiting the giant planets in our solar system, in terms of their relative sizes and semimajor axes. We present a study that quantifies the scaled sizes and separations of the solar system moons with respect to their hosts. We perform a similar study for a large sample of confirmed Kepler planets in multi-planet systems. We show that a comparison between the two samples leads to a similar correlation between their scaled sizes and separation distributions. The different gradients of the correlations may be indicative of differences in the formation and/or long-term dynamics of moon and planetary systems.

Additional Information

© 2013 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2013 April 3; accepted 2013 September 4; published 2013 October 8. The authors would like to thank Jason Eastman, Gregory Laughlin, Philip Muirhead, and Jonathan Swift for insightful discussions. Thanks are also due to the anonymous referee, whose comments improved the quality of the paper. This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program. The authors acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation through grant AST-1109662.

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Published - 1538-3881_146_5_122.pdf

Submitted - 1309.1467v1.pdf

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August 19, 2023
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