Related papers: Cryptoplanet update
We use a semi-analytic circumstellar disk model that considers movement of the snow line through evolution of accretion and the central star to investigate how gas giant frequency changes with stellar mass. The snow line distance changes…
The Milky way Galaxy is brimming with free-floating objects, including stars, planets and planetesimals. For the purpose of this chapter, we define a free-floating object as a solid body that is not orbited by a considerably more massive…
Observations of protoplanetary disks have shown that forming exoplanets leave characteristic imprints on the gas and dust of the disk. In the gas, these forming exoplanets cause deviations from Keplerian motion, which can be detected…
The formation of satellites is thought to be a natural by-product of planet formation in our Solar System, and thus, moons of extrasolar planets (exomoons) may be abundant in extrasolar planetary systems, as well. Exomoons have yet to be…
From hydro-gravitational cosmology, hydrogen-helium gas planets fragmented at the plasma to gas transition 300,000 years after the big bang in million-star-mass clumps. Stars may form in the clumps by mergers of the planets to make globular…
A detailed understanding of the physics of star and planet formation requires study of individual objects as well as statistical assessment of global properties and evolutionary trends. Observational investigations of circumstellar material…
We discuss the nature of rings that may exist around extrasolar planets. Taking the general properties of rings around the gas giants in the Solar System, we infer the likely properties of rings around exoplanets that reside inside the ice…
One of the unique aspects of Earth is that it has a fractionally large Moon, which is thought to have formed from a Moon-forming disk generated by a giant impact. The Moon stabilizes the Earth's spin axis at least by several degrees and…
Following the groundbreaking discovery of the first extrasolar planet orbiting a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b in 1995, the field of planet formation has become a cornerstone of modern astrophysics. This is in part due to the revelation of an…
The extrasolar planets (EPs) so far detected are very different to the planets in our own Solar System. Many of them have Jupiter-like masses and close-in orbits (the so-called hot planets, HPs), with orbital periods of only a few days. In…
The orbital parameters of the observed extrasolar planets differ strongly from those of our own solar system. The differences include planets with high masses, small semi-major axis and large eccentricities. We performed numerical…
Observations in the past decade have revealed extrasolar planets with a wide range of orbital semimajor axes and eccentricities. Based on the present understanding of planet formation via core accretion and oligarchic growth, we expect that…
In view of the many recent observations conducted by ALMA and SPHERE, it is becoming clear that protoplanetary disks form planets in narrow annular gaps at various distances from the central protostars before these protostars are actually…
With over 1800 planets discovered outside of the Solar System in the past two decades, the field of exoplanetology has broadened our perspective on planetary systems. Research priorities are now moving from planet detection to planet…
Analyzing exoplanets detected by radial velocity or transit observations, we determine the multiplicity of exoplanet host stars in order to study the influence of a stellar companion on the properties of planet candidates. Matching the host…
Theories of the formation and early evolution of planetary systems postulate that planets are born in circumstellar disks, and undergo radial migration during and after dissipation of the dust and gas disk from which they formed. The…
The size distribution of exoplanets is a bimodal division into two groups: Rocky planet (<2 Earth radii) and water-rich planet (>2 Earth radii) with or without gaseous envelope.
Exoplanet surveys have confirmed one of humanity's (and all teenagers') worst fears: we are weird. If our Solar System were observed with present-day Earth technology -- to put our system and exoplanets on the same footing -- Jupiter is the…
Exoplanets in protoplanetary disks cause localized deviations from Keplerian velocity in channel maps of molecular line emission. Current methods of characterizing these deviations are time consuming, and there is no unified standard…
Planets form in the circumstellar disks of young stars. We review the basic physical processes by which solid bodies accrete each other and alter each others' random velocities, and we provide order-of-magnitude derivations for the rates of…