Related papers: Dynamics of Exozodiacal Clouds
Constraining the formation processes of small solar system bodies is crucial for gaining insights into planetesimal formation. Their bulk densities, determined by their compressive strengths, offer valuable information about their formation…
Our Solar System includes the Sun, eight major planets and their moons, along with numerous asteroids, comets, and dust particles, collectively known as the small Solar System bodies. Small bodies are relics from the birth of the Solar…
Several lines of observational evidence suggest that white dwarfs receive small birth kicks due to anisotropic mass loss. If other stars possess extrasolar analogues to the Solar Oort cloud, the orbits of comets in such clouds will be…
Interstellar space is filled with a dilute mixture of charged particles, atoms, molecules and dust grains, called the interstellar medium (ISM). Understanding its physical properties and dynamical behavior is of pivotal importance to many…
In this paper, we re-evaluate the estimates of dust mass in galaxies and demonstrate that current dust models are incomplete and based on a priori assumptions. These models suffer from a circularity problem and account for only a small…
The imaging of disks around young stars presents extreme challenges in high dynamic range, angular resolution, and sensitivity. Recent instrumental advances have met these challenges admirably, leading to a marked increase in imaging…
Observations of the dust and gas around embedded stellar clusters reveal some of the processes involved in their formation and evolution. Large scale mass infall with rates dM/dt=4e-4 solar masses/year is found to be disrupted on small…
Recent discoveries of strongly misaligned transiting exoplanets pose a challenge to the established planet formation theory which assumes planetary systems to form and evolve in isolation. However, the fact that the majority of stars…
Some planetary systems harbour debris disks containing planetesimals such as asteroids and comets. Collisions between such bodies produce small dust particles, the spectral features of which reveal their composition and, hence, that of…
Hundreds of circumstellar disks in the Orion nebula are being rapidly destroyed by the intense ultraviolet radiation produced by nearby bright stars. These young, million-year-old disks may not survive long enough to form planetary systems.…
This paper emphasizes the connection between solar and extra-solar debris disks: how models and observations of the Solar System are helping us understand the debris disk phenomenon, and vice versa, how debris disks are helping us place our…
Evidence for exocomets, icy bodies in extrasolar planetary systems, has rapidly increased over the past decade. Volatiles are detected through the gas that exocomets release as they collide and grind down within their natal belts, or as…
Transitional discs have central regions characterised by significant depletion of both dust and gas compared to younger, optically-thick discs. However, gas and dust are not depleted by equal amounts: gas surface densities are typically…
A clear understanding of the chemical processing of matter, as it is transferred from a molecular cloud to a planetary system, depends heavily on knowledge of the physical conditions endured by gas and dust as these accrete onto a disk and…
Most planetary systems -- including our own -- are born within stellar clusters, where interactions with neighboring stars can help shape the system architecture. This paper develops an orbit-averaged formalism to characterize the cluster's…
Dust is essential to the evolution of galaxies and drives the formation of planetary systems. The challenge of inferring the origin of different presolar dust grains from meteoritic samples motivates forward modelling to understand the…
The first indication of the presence of a circumstellar debris disk is usually the detection of excess infrared emission from the population of small dust grains orbiting the star. This dust is short-lived, requiring continual…
Planetary systems can evolve dynamically even after the planets themselves have fully formed, and there is circumstantial evidence that most planetary systems become unstable after the disappearance of the gaseous protoplanetary disk.…
Protoplanetary disks are dynamic objects, within which dust grains and gas are expected to be redistributed over large distances. Evidence for this redistribution is seen both in other protoplanetary disks and in our own Solar System, with…
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…