Related papers: Co-orbital Oligarchy
Wide-orbit exoplanets are starting to be detected, and planetary formation models are under development to understand their properties. We propose a population of "Oort" planets around other stars, forming by a mechanism analogous to how…
Planet formation is generally described in terms of a system containing the host star and a protoplanetary disc, of which the internal properties (e.g. mass and metallicity) determine the properties of the resulting planetary system.…
The chance that a planetary system will interact with another member of its host star's nascent cluster would be greatly increased if gas giant planets form in situ on wide orbits. In this paper, we explore the outcomes of planet-planet…
Mutually misaligned circumbinary planets may form in a warped or broken gas disc or from later planet-planet interactions. With numerical simulations and analytic estimates we explore the dynamics of two circumbinary planets with a large…
The final stage of planet formation is dominated by collisions between planetary embryos. The dynamics of this stage determine the orbital configuration and the mass and composition of planets in the system. In the solar system, late giant…
Planets and other low-mass binary companions to stars face a variety of potential fates as their host stars move off the main sequence and grow to subgiants and giants. Stellar mass loss tends to make orbits expand, and tidal torques tend…
We use numerical $N$-body experiments to explore the statistics of multiple systems formed in small-$N$ subclusters, i.e. the distributions of orbital semi-major axis, $a$, orbital eccentricity, $e$, mass ratio, $q$, mutual orbital…
During the formation of rocky planets, the surface environments of growing protoplanets were dramatically different from those of present-day planets. The release of gravitational energy during accretion would have maintained a molten…
The obliquity of a star, or the angle between its spin axis and the average orbit normal of its companion planets, provides a unique constraint on that system's evolutionary history. Unlike the Solar System, where the Sun's equator is…
As gas giant planets evolve, they may scatter other planets far from their original orbits to produce hot Jupiters or rogue planets that are not gravitationally bound to any star. Here, we consider planets cast out to large orbital…
Many of the observed spin--orbit alignment properties of exoplanets can be explained in the context of the primordial disk misalignment model, in which an initially aligned protoplanetary disk is torqued by a distant stellar companion on a…
We show that interaction with a gas disk may produce young planetary systems with closely-spaced orbits, stabilized by mean-motion resonances between neighbors. On longer timescales, after the gas is gone, interaction with a remnant…
The formation of a planetary system from the protoplanetary disk leads to destruction of the latter; however, a debris disk can remain in the form of asteroids and cometary material. The motion of planets can cause the formation of…
The two dominant features in the distribution of orbital parameters for close-in exoplanets are the prevalence of circular orbits for very short periods, and the observation that planets on closer orbits tend to be heavier. The first…
We investigate the formation of icy super-Earth mass planets within a gravitationally unstable ring of solids orbiting at 250-750 AU around a 1 solar mass star. Coagulation calculations demonstrate that a system of a few large oligarchs and…
Fragmentation often occurs in disk-like structures, both in the early Universe and in the context of present-day star formation. Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are astrophysical objects whose origin is not well understood; they weigh…
Earth-mass bodies are expected to undergo Type I migration directed either inward or outward depending on the thermodynamical state of the protoplanetary disc. Zones of convergent migration exist where the Type I torque cancels out. We…
We consider the growth of a protoplanetary embryo embedded in a planetesimal disk. We take into account the dynamical evolution of the disk caused by (1) planetesimal-planetesimal interactions, which increase random motions and smooth…
Statistics of the angle \Phi between orbital angular momenta in hierarchical triple systems with known inner visual or astrometric orbits are studied. Correlation between apparent revolution directions proves partial orbit alignment known…
Evolution and disruption of galaxies orbiting in the gravitational field of a larger cluster galaxy are driven by three coupled mechanisms: 1) the heating due to its time dependent motion in the primary; 2) mass loss due to the tidal strain…