Related papers: Gaseous Inner Disks
Newly formed stars are often observed to possess circumstellar disks, from which mass continues to be accreted onto the star and fed into outflowing jets, and which eventually may evolve into dusty debris disks and planetary systems. Recent…
Planet formation occurs over a few Myr within protoplanetary discs of dust and gas, which are often assumed to evolve in isolation. However, extended gaseous structures have been uncovered around many protoplanetary discs, suggestive of…
The disks of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) are expected to be populated by numerous stars, either formed in the outer regions of the disk via gravitational instability, or captured from the nearby nuclear star cluster. Regardless of their…
The origin of disks surrounding young stars has direct implications for our understanding of the formation of planetary systems. In the interstellar clouds from which star form, angular momentum is regulated by magnetic fields, preventing…
Disks of gas accreting onto supermassive black holes are thought to power active galactic nuclei (AGN). Stars may form in gravitationally unstable regions of these disks, or may be captured from nuclear star clusters. Because of the dense…
We review the current theoretical understanding how growth from micro-meter sized dust to massive giant planets occurs in disks around young stars. After introducing a number of observational constraints from the solar system, from observed…
Circumstellar disks have long been regarded as windows into planetary systems. The advent of high sensitivity, high resolution imaging in the submillimetre where both the solid and gas components of disks can be detected opens up new…
Circumstellar disks are an essential ingredient of the formation of low-mass stars. It is unclear, however, whether the accretion-disk paradigm can also account for the formation of stars more massive than about 10 solar masses, in which…
Observational evidence suggests that gas disk instability may be responsible for the formation of at least some gas giant exoplanets, particularly massive or distant gas giants. With regard to close-in gas giants, Boss (2017) used the…
The dust- and gas-rich protoplanetary disks around young stellar systems play a key role in star and planet formation. While considerable progress has recently been made in probing these disks on large scales of a few tens of astronomical…
Giant planets grow and acquire their gas envelope during the disk phase. At the time of the discovery of giant planets in their host disk, it is important to understand the interplay between the host disk and the envelope and…
The study of the development of structures on multiple scales in the cold interstellar medium has experienced rapid expansion in the past decade, on both the observational and the theoretical front. Spectral line studies at (sub-)millimeter…
Our understanding of protoplanetary disks has greatly improved over the last decade due to a wealth of data from new facilities. Unbiased dust surveys with Spitzer leave us with good constraints on the dust dispersal timescale of small…
In the standard model of structure formation, galaxies form in the centre of dark matter haloes that develop as a result of inhomogeneities in the primordial mass distribution of the Universe. Afterwards, galaxies grow by means of…
Transition disks have dust-depleted inner regions and may represent an intermediate step of an on-going disk dispersal process, where planet formation is probably in progress. Recent millimetre observations of transition disks reveal…
Mergers between gas--rich disks and less--massive dwarf galaxies are studied using numerical simulation. As the orbit of a satellite decays through dynamical friction, the primary disk develops large-amplitude spirals in response to its…
Gas in protostellar disks provides the raw material for giant planet formation and controls the dynamics of the planetesimal-building dust grains. Accurate gas mass measurements help map the observed properties of planet-forming disks onto…
Evidence for gas accretion onto galaxies can be found throughout the universe. In this chapter, I summarize the direct and indirect signatures of this process and discuss the primary sources. The evidence for gas accretion includes the star…
The presence of radial truncations in stellar disks is reviewed. There is ample evidence that many disk galaxies have relatively shaprt truncations in their disks. These often are symmetric and independent of the wavelength band of the…
In this paper, we calculate simulated scattered light images of a circumstellar disk in which a planet is forming by gravitational instability. The simulated images bear no correlation to the vertically integrated surface density of the…