Related papers: No Planet Left Behind: Investigating Planetary Div…
About half of all known stellar systems with Sun-like stars consist of two or more stars, significantly affecting the orbital stability of any planet in these systems. Here we study the onset of instability for an Earth-type planet that is…
We demonstrate that gravitational lensing can be used to discover and study planets in the habitable zones of nearby dwarf stars. If appropriate software is developed, a new generation of monitoring programs will automatically conduct a…
Over 30 planetary systems have been discovered to reside in binary stars. For small separations gravitational perturbation of the secondary star has a strong influence on the planet formation process. It truncates the protoplanetary disk,…
The formation of planets is one of the major unsolved problems in modern astrophysics. Planets are believed to form out of the material in circumstellar disks known to exist around young stars, and which are a by-product of the star…
In recent years a paradigm shift has occurred in exoplanet science, wherein low-mass stars are increasingly viewed as a foundational pillar of the search for potentially habitable worlds in the solar neighborhood. However, the formation…
The binary system 16 Cygni is key in studies of the planet-star chemical composition connection, as only one of the stars is known to host a planet. This allows us to better assess the possible influence of planet interactions on the…
We simulate the formation of planetary systems around Alpha Centauri B. The N-body accretionary evolution of a 1/r disk populated with 400-900 lunar-mass protoplanets is followed for 200 Myr. All simulations lead to the formation of…
The Planet Formation Imager (PFI) project aims to provide a strong scientific vision for ground-based optical astronomy beyond the upcoming generation of Extremely Large Telescopes. We make the case that a breakthrough in angular resolution…
The great diversity of the thousands of planets known to date is proof of the multitude of ways in which formation and evolution processes can shape the life of planetary systems. Multiple formation and evolution paths, however, can result…
Are there other planetary systems in our Universe? Indirect evidence has been found for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy: the gravity of orbiting planets makes the star wobble, and the resulting periodic Doppler shifts have been…
We examine recent studies on the formation rate of planetary nebulae and find this rate to be about one-third of the formation rate of white dwarfs. This implies than only about one-third of all planetary nebulae that evolve to form white…
Gravitational interactions in star-forming regions are capable of disrupting and destroying planetary systems, as well as creating new ones. In particular, a planet can be stolen, where it is directly exchanged between passing stars during…
The interpretation of the origin of observed exoplanets is usually done only qualitatively due to uncertainties of key parameters in planet formation models. To allow a quantitative methodology which traces back in time to the planet birth…
The search for satellites around exoplanets represents one of the greatest challenges in advancing the characterization of planetary systems. Currently, we can only detect massive satellites, which resemble additional planetary companions…
Prior to the 1990s, speculations about the occurrence of planets around other stars were based only on planet formation theory, observations of circumstellar disks, and the knowledge that at least one seemingly ordinary star had managed to…
We investigate and compare the composition of M-dwarf planets in systems with only one known planet (``singles") to those residing in multi-planet systems (``multis") and the fundamental properties of their host stars. We restrict our…
Circumstellar disks are the sites of planet formation, and the very high incidence of extrasolar planets implies that most of them actually form planetary systems. Studying the structure and evolution of protoplanetary disks can thus place…
The presence of stellar companions around planet hosting stars influences the architecture of their planetary systems. To find and characterise these companions and determine their orbits is thus an important consideration to understand…
Binary star systems are assumed to be co-natal and coeval, thus to have identical chemical composition. In this work we aim to test the hypothesis that there is a connection between observed element abundance patterns and the formation of…
We investigated the underlying architecture of planetary systems by deriving the distribution of planet multiplicity (number of planets) and the distribution of orbital inclinations based on the sample of planet candidates discovered by the…