Close-in planets undergo strong tidal effects with their host stars that modify their spins and orbits. Adopting a Maxwell rheology, it has been shown that for the 5/2 and 7/2 spin-orbit resonances, the obliquity of these planets can stabilise at a high value. Here, we show that these high obliquity metastable states can also be observed for the same spin-orbit resonances considering the Andrade rheology.

The evolution of the five largest satellites of Uranus during the crossing of the 5/3 mean motion resonance between Ariel and Umbriel is strongly affected by chaotic motion. Studies with numerical integrations of the equations of motion and analysis of Poincaré surface sections provided helpful insights to the role of chaos on the system. However, they lack of a quantification of this chaos in the phase-space. Here, we construct stability maps using the frequency analysis method. We determine that for low energies (small eccentricity and/or inclinations), the phase-space is mainly stable. As the energy increases, the chaotic regions replace the stable motion, until only small, localized libration regions remain stable.

Self-Consistent 2D modelling of stellar wind interaction with the upper atmosphere of WASP-12b has been performed. The two case-scenarios of the planetary material escape and interaction with the stellar wind, namely the ‘blown by the wind’ (without the inclusion of tidal force) and ‘captured by the star’ (with the tidal force) have been modelled under different stellar XUV radiations and stellar wind parameters. In the first scenario, a shock is formed around the planet, and the planetary mass loss is controlled completely by the stellar radiation energy input. In the second scenario, the mass loss is mainly due to the gravitational interaction effects. The dynamics of MGII and related absorption were modelled with three sets of different stellar wind parameters and XUV flux values.

With the development of high contrast imaging techniques and instruments, vast efforts have been devoted during the past decades to detect and characterize lighter, cooler and closer companions to nearby stars, and ultimately image new planetary systems. Complementary to other planet-hunting techniques, this approach has opened a new astrophysical window to study the physical properties and the formation mechanisms of brown dwarfs and planets. In this review, I will briefly describe the different observing techniques and strategies used, the main samples of targeted nearby stars, finally the main results obtained so far about exoplanet discoveries characterization of their physical properties, and study of their occurrence and possible formation and evolution mechanisms.

In traditional transit timing variations (TTVs) analysis of multi-planetary systems, the individual TTVs are first derived from transit fitting and later modelled using n-body dynamic simulations to constrain planetary masses. We show that fitting simultaneously the transit light curves with the system dynamics (photo-dynamical model) increases the precision of the TTV measurements and helps constrain the system architecture. We exemplify the advantages of applying this photo-dynamical model to a multi-planetary system found in K2 data very close to 3:2 mean motion resonance, K2-19. In this case the period of the larger TTV variations (libration period) is much longer (>1.5 years) than the duration of the K2 observations (80 days). However, our method allows to detect the short period TTVs produced by the orbital conjunctions between the planets that in turn permits to uniquely characterise the system. Therefore, our method can be used to constrain the masses of near-resonant systems even when the full libration curve is not observed.

Planets with masses between 0.1 and 10 M⊕ are believed to host dense atmospheres. These atmospheres can play an important role on the planet's spin evolution, since thermal atmospheric tides, driven by the host star, may counterbalance gravitational tides. In this work, we study the long-term spin evolution of Earth-sized exoplanets. We generalize previous works by including the effect of eccentric orbits and obliquity. We show that under the effect of tides and core–mantle friction, the obliquity of the planets evolves either to 0° or 180°. The rotation of these planets is also expected to evolve into a very restricted number of equilibrium configurations. In general, none of these equilibria is synchronous with the orbital mean motion. The role of thermal atmospheric tides becomes more important for Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of their systems; so they cannot be neglected when we search for their potential habitability.

We present a model for the in situ assembly of planetary systems around a 0.5 M⊙ star, and compare the resulting statistics with the observed sample of cool Kepler planet candidates. We are able to reproduce the distribution of planetary periods and period ratios, although we once again find an underabundance of single transit systems relative to the observations. We also demonstrate that almost every planetary system assembled in this fashion contains at least one planet in the habitable zone, and that water delivery to these planets can potentially produce water content comparable to that of Earth. Our results broadly support the notion that habitable planets are plentiful around M dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood.

The presence of additional bodies orbiting a binary star system can be detected by monitoring the binary's eclipse timing. These so-called circumbinary objects will reveal themselves by i) either introducing a reflex motion of the binary system about the total system's barycenter creating a geometric light-travel time effect (LITE), ii) by gravitational perturbations on the binary orbit, or iii) a combination of the two effects resulting in eclipse timing (ETV) and transit timing (TTV) variations. Motivated by the four recently detected circumbinary planets by the Kepler space telescope (Kepler-16b, Kepler-34b, Kepler-35b and Kepler-38b) we have begun to study their dynamics in the presence of an additional massive perturber. In particular we used Kepler-16b as a test bed case. We are aiming to study the detectability of non-transiting and inclined circumbinary planets using the ETV effect along with the fast indicator MEGNO to quantitatively map the chaotic/quasi-periodic regions of the orbital parameter-space and to determine where the orbit of a circumbinary planet will be stable. We have calculated the amplitudes of TTV and ETV signals for different values of the mass and orbital elements of the planet and binary.