Related papers: Stokes trapping and planet formation
Two fundamentally different processes of rocky planet formation exist, but it is unclear which one built the terrestrial planets of the solar system. Either they formed by collisions among planetary embryos from the inner solar system, or…
According to the sequential accretion model, giant planet formation is based first on the formation of a solid core which, when massive enough, can gravitationally bind gas from the nebula to form the envelope. In order to trigger the…
In the incremental growth model, planetesimal formation constitutes the least understood step in the process of planetary formation. The two main difficulties in this regard are the collision/fragmentation and the drift barriers. Numerous…
Super-Earths are found in tighter orbits than the Earth's around more than one third of main sequence stars. It has been proposed that super-Earths are scaled-up terrestrial planets that formed similarly, through mutual accretion of…
The initial stages of planet formation in circumstellar gas discs proceed via dust grains that collide and build up larger and larger bodies (Safronov 1969). How this process continues from metre-sized boulders to kilometre-scale…
Terrestrial planets form in a series of dynamical steps from the solid component of circumstellar disks. First, km-sized planetesimals form likely via a combination of sticky collisions, turbulent concentration of solids, and gravitational…
Building the terrestrial planets has been a challenge for planet formation models. In particular, classical theories have been unable to reproduce the small mass of Mars and instead predict that a planet near 1.5 AU should roughly be the…
The ring-like structures in protoplanetary discs that are observed in the cold dust emission by ALMA, might be explained by dust aggregates trapped aerodynamically in pressure maxima. The effect of a transient pressure maximum is…
The observed rapid onset of star formation in molecular clouds requires rapid formation of dense fragments which can collapse individually before being overtaken by global gravitationally-driven flows. Many previous investigations have…
Two puzzles associated with open clusters have attracted a lot of attention -- their formation, with densities and velocity dispersions that are not too different from those of the star forming regions in the Galaxy, given that the observed…
We review the problem of the formation of terrestrial planets, with particular emphasis on the interaction of dynamical and geochemical models. The lifetime of gas around stars in the process of formation is limited to a few million years…
The core accretion scenario of planet formation assumes that planetesimals and planetary embryos are formed during the primordial, gaseous phases of the protoplanetary disk. However, how the dust particles overcome the traditional growth…
Differential settling and growth of dust grains impact the structure of the radiative envelopes of gaseous planets during formation. Sufficiently rapid dust growth can result in envelopes with substantially reduced opacities for radiation…
Planetary formation is an efficient process now thought to take place on a relatively short astronomical time scale. Recent observations have shown that the dust surrounding a protostar emits more efficiently at longer wavelengths as the…
The consistency of planet formation models suffers from the disconnection between the regime of small and large bodies. This is primarily caused by so-called growth barriers: the direct growth of larger bodies is halted at centimetre-sized…
The past decade has seen major progress in our understanding of terrestrial planet formation. Yet key questions remain. In this review we first address the growth of 100 km-scale planetesimals as a consequence of dust coagulation and…
Massive stars form in clusters within self-gravitating molecular clouds. The size scale of these clusters is sufficiently large that non-thermal, or turbulent, motions of the gas must be taken into account when considering their formation.…
Although the basic physics of star formation is classical, numerical simulations have yielded essential insights into how stars form. They show that star formation is a highly nonuniform runaway process characterized by the emergence of…
The formation of giant planets requires accumulation of ~10 Earth mass in solids; but how do protoplanets acquire their mass? There are many, often competing processes that regulate the accretion rate of protoplanets. To assess their…
One of the main problems in planet formation, hampering the growth of small dust to planetesimals, is the so-called radial-drift barrier. Pebbles of cm to dm sizes are thought to drift radially across protoplanetary discs faster than they…