Abstract. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will search for planets transiting bright and nearby stars. TESS has been selected by NASA for launch in 2017 as an Astrophysics Explorer mission. The spacecraft will be placed into a highly elliptical 13.7-day orbit around the Earth. During its 2-year mission, TESS will employ four wide-field optical charge-coupled device cameras to monitor at least 200,000 main-sequence dwarf stars with I C ≈ 4 − 13 for temporary drops in brightness caused by planetary transits. Each star will be observed for an interval ranging from 1 month to 1 year, depending mainly on the star's ecliptic latitude. The longest observing intervals will be for stars near the ecliptic poles, which are the optimal locations for follow-up observations with the James Webb Space Telescope. Brightness measurements of preselected target stars will be recorded every 2 min, and full frame images will be recorded every 30 min. TESS stars will be 10 to 100 times brighter than those surveyed by the pioneering Kepler mission. This will make TESS planets easier to characterize with follow-up observations. TESS is expected to find more than a thousand planets smaller than Neptune, including dozens that are comparable in size to the Earth. Public data releases will occur every 4 months, inviting immediate community-wide efforts to study the new planets. The TESS legacy will be a catalog of the nearest and brightest stars hosting transiting planets, which will endure as highly favorable targets for detailed investigations. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.

In an attempt to develop a deterministic theory for planet formation, we examine the accretion of cores of giant planets from planetesimals, gas accretion onto the cores, and their orbital migration. We adopt a working model for nascent protostellar disks with a wide variety of surface density distributions in order to explore the range of diversity among extra solar planetary systems. We evaluate the cores' mass-growth rateṀ c through runaway planetesimal accretion and oligarchic growth. The accretion rate of cores is estimated with a two-body approximation. In the inner regions of disks, the cores' eccentricity is effectively damped by the ambient disk gas and their early growth is stalled by "isolation". In the outer regions, the cores' growth rate is much slower. If some cores can acquire more mass than a critical value of several Earth masses during the persistence of the disk gas, they would be able to rapidly accrete gas and evolve into gas giant planets. The gas accretion process is initially regulated by the Kelvin-Helmholtz contraction of the planets' gas envelope. Based on the assumption that the exponential decay of the disk-gas mass occurs on the time scales ∼ 10 6 − 10 7 years and that the disk mass distribution is comparable to those inferred from the observations of circumstellar disks of T Tauri stars, we carry out simulations to predict the distributions of masses and semi major axes of extra solar planets. In disks as massive as the minimum-mass disk for the Solar system, gas giants can form only slightly outside the "ice boundary" at a few AU. But, cores can rapidly grow above the critical mass interior to the ice boundary in protostellar disks with 5 times more heavy elements than those of the minimum-mass disk. Thereafter, these massive cores accrete gas prior to its depletion and evolve into gas giants. Unimpeded dynamical accretion of gas is a runaway process

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Many extrasolar planets orbit sufficiently close to their host stars that significant tidal interactions can be expected, resulting in an evolution of the spin and orbital properties of the planets. The accompanying dissipation of energy can also be an important source of heat, leading to the inflation of short-period planets and even mass loss through Roche-lobe overflow. Tides may therefore play an important role in determining the observed distributions of mass, orbital period, and eccentricity of the extrasolar planets. In addition, tidal interactions between gaseous giant planets in the solar system and their moons are thought to be responsible for the orbital migration of the satellites, leading to their capture into resonant configurations.Traditionally, the efficiency of tidal dissipation is simply parametrized by a quality factor Q, which depends, in principle, in an unknown way on the frequency and amplitude of the tidal forcing. In this paper, we treat the underlying fluid dynamical problem with the aim of determining the efficiency of tidal dissipation in gaseous giant planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, or the short-period extrasolar planets. Efficient convection enforces a nearly adiabatic stratification in these bodies, which may or may not contain rocky cores. With some modifications, our approach can also be applied to fully convective low-mass stars.In cases of interest, the tidal forcing frequencies are typically comparable to the spin frequency of the planet but are small compared to its dynamical frequency. We therefore study the linearized response of a slowly and possibly differentially rotating planet to low-frequency tidal forcing. Convective regions of the planet support inertial waves, which possess a dense or continuous frequency spectrum in the absence of viscosity, while any radiative regions support generalized Hough waves. We formulate the relevant equations for studying the excitation of these disturbances and present a set of illustrative numerical calculations of the tidal dissipation rate.