Related papers: Circumstellar Disk Evolution: Constraining Theorie…
The envelopes and disks that surround protostars reflect the initial conditions of star and planet formation and govern the assembly of stellar masses. Characterizing these structures requires observations that span the near-infrared to…
Protoplanetary disks composed of dust and gas are ubiquitous around young stars and are commonly recognized as nurseries of planetary systems. Their lifetime, appearance, and structure are determined by an interplay between stellar…
The statistical properties of circumstellar disks around young stars are important for constraining theoretical models for the formation and early evolution of planetary systems. In this brief review, I survey the literature related to…
The disks that orbit young stars are the essential conduits and reservoirs of material for star and planet formation. Their structures, meaning the spatial variations of the disk physical conditions, reflect the underlying mechanisms that…
We examine the formation of planets around binary stars in light of the recently discovered systems Kepler 16, 34 and 35. We conduct hydrodynamical simulations of self gravitating disks around binary systems. The selected binary and disk…
The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it is an important component of the interstellar medium and plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies, the formation of stars and…
Gaps in protoplanetary disks have long been hailed as signposts of planet formation. However, a direct link between exoplanets and disks remains hard to identify. We present a large sample study of ALMA disk surveys of nearby star-forming…
Main sequence stars, like the Sun, are often found to be orbited by circumstellar material that can be categorized into two groups, planets and debris. The latter is made up of asteroids and comets, as well as the dust and gas derived from…
Protoplanetary disks dissipate rapidly after the central star forms, on time-scales comparable to those inferred for planet formation. In order to allow the formation of planets, disks must survive the dispersive effects of UV and X-ray…
Understanding the collapse of clouds and the formation of protoplanetary disks is essential to understanding the formation of stars and planets. Infall and accretion, the mass-aggregation processes that occur at envelope and disk scales,…
This article is based on an invited talk given by V. P. Kulkarni at the 8th Cosmic Dust meeting. Dust has a profound effect on the physics and chemistry of the interstellar gas in galaxies and on the appearance of galaxies. Understanding…
Stars with circumstellar disks may form in environments with high stellar and gas densities which affects the disks through processes like truncation from dynamical encounters, ram pressure stripping, and external photoevaporation.…
The study of protoplanetary disc evolution and planet formation has mainly concentrated on solar (and low) mass stars since they host the majority of the confirmed exoplanets. Nevertheless, the numerous planets found orbiting stars up to…
The current picture painted by the observations of circumstellar dust at white dwarfs, and the consequent atmospheric pollution, is of a surviving planetary system. This chapter recounts in detail both the discovery and empirical…
Circumstellar disks have long been regarded as windows into planetary systems. The advent of high sensitivity, high resolution imaging in the submillimetre where both the solid and gas components of disks can be detected opens up new…
Few scientific discoveries have captured the public imagination like the explosion of exoplanetary science during the past two decades. This work has fundamentally changed our picture of Earth's place in the Universe and led NASA to make…
Disk material has been observed around both components of some young close binary star systems. It has been shown that if planets form at the right places within such disks, they can remain dynamically stable for very long times. Herein, we…
In this paper, we calculate simulated scattered light images of a circumstellar disk in which a planet is forming by gravitational instability. The simulated images bear no correlation to the vertically integrated surface density of the…
Circumstellar disks are an essential ingredient of the formation of low-mass stars. It is unclear, however, whether the accretion-disk paradigm can also account for the formation of stars more massive than about 10 solar masses, in which…
We propose to the community a comprehensive UV/optical/NIR imaging survey of Galactic star formation regions to probe all aspects of the star formation process. The primary goal of such a study is to understand the evolution of…