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Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…
Excess emission, associated with warm, dust belts, commonly known as exozodis, has been observed around a third of nearby stars. The high levels of dust required to explain the observations are not generally consistent with steady-state…
At present, because of observational selection effects, we know of no exoplanetary systems with any planetary masses close to that of the Earth. We have therefore used computer models to see whether such planets could be dynamically stable…
The final assembly of terrestrial planets occurs via massive collisions, which can launch copious clouds of dust that are warmed by the star and glow in the infrared. We report the real-time detection of a debris-producing impact in the…
Detecting massive satellites of extrasolar planets has now become feasible, which led naturally to questions about their habitability. In a previous study we presented constraints on the habitability of moons from stellar and planetary…
Dynamical evolution within planetary systems can cause planets to be engulfed by their host stars. Following engulfment, the stellar photosphere abundance pattern will reflect accretion of rocky material from planets. Multi-star systems are…
There is currently debate over whether the dust content of planetary systems is stochastically regenerated or originates in planetesimal belts evolving in steady state. In this paper a simple model for the steady state evolution of debris…
The Pluto-Charon system has come into sharper focus following the fly by of New Horizons. We use N-body simulations to probe the unique dynamical history of this binary dwarf planet system. We follow the evolution of the debris disc that…
Most stars form in a clustered environment. Both single and binary stars will sometimes encounter planetary systems in such crowded environments. Encounter rates for binaries may be larger than for single stars, even for binary fractions as…
A gamma-ray burst (GRB) is a strong and fast gamma-ray emission from the explosion of stellar systems (massive stars or coalescing binary compact stellar remnants), happening at any possible redshift, and detected by space missions.…
Although numerous simulations have been done to understand the effects of intense bursts of star formation on high surface brightness galaxies, few attempts have been made to understand how localized starbursts would affect both the color…
The observation by the BATSE instrument on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory that gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are distributed isotropically around the Earth but nonuniformly in distance has led to the widespread conclusion that GRBs are most…
A nearby supernova (SN) explosion could have negatively influenced life on Earth, maybe even been responsible for mass extinctions. Mass extinction poses a significant extinction of numerous species on Earth, as recorded in the…
As a copious source of gamma-rays, a nearby Galactic Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) can be a threat to life. Using recent determinations of the rate of GRBs, their luminosity function and properties of their host galaxies, we estimate the…
In low-metallicity environments, massive stars might avoid supernova explosion and directly collapse, forming massive (~25-80 solar masses) stellar black holes (MSBHs), at the end of their life. MSBHs, when hosted in young massive clusters,…
We investigate the possibility that the Moon's formation impact was triggered by an early dynamical instability of the giant planets. We consider the well-studied "jumping Jupiter" hypothesis for the solar system's instability, where…
The detection of thousands of extrasolar planets by the transit method naturally raises the question of whether potential extrasolar observers could detect the transits of the Solar System planets. We present a comprehensive analysis of the…
We investigate the effect of a dark matter caustic passing through the Solar System. We find, confirming a previous result, that the Sun tracks the caustic surface for some time. We integrate numerically the equations of motion of the Sun…
Recent exoplanet surveys revealed that for solar-type stars, close-in Super-Earths are ubiquitous and many of them are in multi-planet systems. These systems are more compact than the Solar System's terrestrial planets. However, there have…
The dust disks observed around mature stars are evidence that plantesimals are present in these systems on spatial scales that are similar to that of the asteroids and the KBOs in the Solar System. These dust disks (a.k.a. ``debris disks'')…