Related papers: Table of Contents: Planetary Systems Beyond the Ma…

How can scientists conclude with high confidence that an exoplanet hosts life? As telescopes come on line over the next 20 years that can directly observe photons from terrestrial exoplanets, this question will dictate the activities of…

Mounting discoveries of extrasolar planets orbiting post-main sequence stars motivate studies aimed at understanding the fate of these planets. In the traditional "adiabatic" approximation, a secondary's eccentricity remains constant during…

Accretion of planetary material onto host stars may occur throughout a star's life. Especially prone to accretion, extrasolar planets in short-period orbits, while relatively rare, constitute a significant fraction of the known population,…

We study the final architecture of planetary systems that evolve under the combined effects of planet-planet and planetesimal scattering. Using N-body simulations we investigate the dynamics of marginally unstable systems of gas and ice…

We study the stability of systems of three giant planets orbiting 3 - 8 M_Sol stars at orbital distances of >10 au as the host star ages through the Main Sequence (MS) and well into the White Dwarf (WD) stage. Systems are stable on the MS…

Analysis of the statistical properties of exoplanets, together with those of their host stars, are providing a unique view into the process of planet formation and evolution. In this paper we explore the properties of the mass distribution…

Red supergiants are the largest stars known with some of the highest mass loss rates observed. They are the final stage in the evolution of the majority of massive stars. The unexpected discovery of high mass loss episodes in many red…

The search for exoplanets has revealed a diversity of planetary system architectures, the vast majority of which diverge significantly from the template of the solar system. In particular, giant planets beyond the snow line are relatively…

The discovery of planetary systems outside of the solar system has challenged some of the tenets of planetary formation. Among the difficult-to-explain observations, are systems with a giant planet orbiting a very-low mass star, such as the…

Since the discovery of the first extra-solar planets, we are confronted with the puzzling diversity of planetary systems. Processes like planet radial migration in gas-disks and planetary orbital instabilities, often invoked to explain the…

Exoplanets are typically thought to form in protoplanetary disks left over from protostellar disk of their newly formed host star. However, additional planetary formation and evolution routes may exist in old evolved binary systems. Here we…

This White Paper, submitted to the National Academy of Sciences' Astro2010 Decadal Review Committee, focuses on 2 central themes in the study of young brown dwarfs -- their formation mechanism and disk characteristics -- which are of direct…

We investigate the stellar content of the starburst dwarf galaxy IC10 using accurate and deep optical data collected with the Advanced Camera for Surveys and with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on board the Hubble Space Telescope. The…

Stars strongly impact their environment, and shape structures on all scales throughout the universe, in a process known as ``feedback''. Due to the complexity of both stellar evolution and the physics of larger astrophysical structures,…

A number of trends among the properties of exoplanets have become evident in the years since the first one was announced in 1995. One particularly interesting trend began to emerge in 1997 -- the incidence of giant planets correlates with…

In the present paper we discuss a selection of facts and questions related to observations and evolutionary calculations of massive single stars and massive stars in interacting binaries. We focus on the surface chemical abundances, the…

We investigate the observed depletion of red giants in the cores of post-core-collapse globular clusters. In particular, the evolutionary scenario we consider is a binary consisting of two low-mass stars which undergoes two common envelope…

During the late stage of planet formation when Mars-size cores appear, interactions among planetary cores can excite their orbital eccentricities, speed their merges and thus sculpture the final architecture of planet systems. This series…

In the last few years, a number of planets have been proposed to orbit several post main-sequence binary star systems on the basis of observed variations in the timing of eclipses between the binary components. A common feature of these…

This is the product of a Gaia GREAT workshop on "Gaia and the end states of stellar evolution" held at the University of Leicester in April 2011.