Related papers: Primordial Planet Formation
Most low-mass stars form in stellar clusters that also contain massive stars, which are sources of far-ultraviolet (FUV) radiation. Theoretical models predict that this FUV radiation produces photo-dissociation regions (PDRs) on the…
Planet formation remains a fundamentally important yet poorly understood process. Protoplanetary disks, the birthplaces of planetary systems, exhibit a wide range of substructures that are increasingly interpreted as signatures of…
Giant planet embryos are believed to be spawned by gravitational instability in massive extended (R ~ 100 AU) protostellar discs. In a recent paper we have shown that dust can sediment inside the embryos, as argued earlier by Boss (1998) in…
We explore the appearance of terrestrial planets in formation by studying the emergent spectra of hot molten protoplanets during their collisional formation. While such collisions are rare, the surfaces of these bodies may remain hot at…
We study the formation and long-term evolution of primordial protostellar disks harbored by first stars using numerical hydrodynamics simulations in the thin-disk limit. The initial conditions are specified by pre-stellar cores with…
We consider trends resulting from two formation mechanisms for short-period super-Earths: planet-planet scattering and migration. We model scenarios where these planets originate near the snow line in ``cold finger'' circumstellar disks.…
Planetesimals form in gas-rich protoplanetary disks around young stars. However, protoplanetary disks fade in about 10 Myr. The planetesimals (and also many of the planets) left behind are too dim to study directly. Fortunately, collisions…
Direct imaging observations constrain the fraction of stars orbited by gas giant planets with separations greater than 10 au to about 0.01 only. This is widely believed to indicate that massive protoplanetary discs rarely fragment on…
The transition between the nearly smooth initial state of the Universe and its clumpy state today occurred during the epoch when the first stars and low-luminosity quasars formed. For Cold Dark Matter cosmologies, the radiation produced by…
The high occurrence rates of spiral arms and large central clearings in protoplanetary disks, if interpreted as signposts of giant planets, indicate that gas giants form commonly as companions to young stars ($<$ few Myr) at orbital…
Free-floating planets (FFPs) are the lightest products of star formation and they carry important information on the initial conditions of the environment in which they were formed. They were first discovered in the 2000s but still few of…
The first stars are known to form in primordial gas, either in minihalos with about $10^6$~M$_\odot$ or so-called atomic cooling halos of about $10^8$~M$_\odot$. Simulations have shown that gravitational collapse and disk formation in…
Population III (or Pop. III) stars, the first stellar generation built up from metal-free primordial gas, first started to form at redshifts z ~ 30. They formed primarily in small dark matter halos with masses of a few million solar masses.…
We study the formation and properties of dark neutron stars in a scenario where dark matter is made up of (heavy) dark baryons in a sequestered copy of the MSSM. This scenario naturally explains the coincidence of baryonic and dark matter…
The formation and evolution of a circumstellar disk in magnetized cloud cores is investigated from prestellar core stage until sim 10^4 yr after protostar formation. In the circumstellar disk, fragmentation first occurs due to gravitational…
The exoplanet diversity has been linked to the disc environment in which they form, where the host star metallicity and the formation pathways play a crucial role. In the context of the core accretion paradigm, the initial stages of planet…
The standard model for gravitational structure formation in astrophysics, astronomy, and cosmology is questioned. Cold dark matter (CDM) hierarchical clustering cosmology neglects particle collisions, viscosity, turbulence and diffusion and…
First, the formation of first objects driven by dark matter is revisited by high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations. It is revealed that dark matter haloes of ~10^4M_sun can produce first luminous objects with the aid of dark matter cusps.…
We explore here the idea, reminiscent in some respect of Von Weizsacker's (1944) and Alfven's (1976) outmoded cosmogonies, that long-lived vortices in a turbulent protoplanetary nebula can capture large amount of solid particles and…
The first stars fundamentally transformed the early universe by emitting the first light and by producing the first heavy elements. These effects were predetermined by the mass distribution of the first stars, which is thought to have been…