6 papers · 1 filter
Two-stage disruption of resonant chains
Nick Choksi, Yoram Lithwick, Eugene Chiang +1
TESS is enabling the discovery of transiting planets around young stars. These observations suggest that most close-in planets were born in chains of mean-motion resonances that br…
Eccentric Disks With Self-Gravity
Yoram Lithwick, Eugene Chiang, Leon Mikulinsky +1
Can a disk orbiting a central body be eccentric, when the disk feels its own self-gravity and is pressureless? Contradictory answers appear in the literature. We show that such a d…
Enceladus's Tidal Heating
Yoram Lithwick
Saturn raises a time-dependent tide on its small moon Enceladus, due to the eccentricity of the orbit. As shown in a companion paper (Goldreich et al.), the resulting tidal heating…
Enceladus's Limit Cycle
Peter Goldreich, Yoram Lithwick, Jing Luan
Enceladus exhibits some remarkable phenomena, including water geysers spraying through surface cracks, a global ice shell that is librating atop an ocean, a large luminosity, and r…
Repelling Planet pairs by Ping-pong Scattering
Yanqin Wu, Renu Malhotra, Yoram Lithwick
The Kepler mission reveals a peculiar trough-peak feature in the orbital spacing of close-in planets near mean-motion resonances: a deficit and an excess that are a couple percent…
Irradiated Disks May Settle into Staircases
Taylor Kutra, Yanqin Wu, Yoram Lithwick
Much of a protoplanetary disk is thermally controlled by irradiation from the central star. Such a disk, long thought to have a smoothly flaring shape, is unstable to the so-called…