Related papers: The debris disk - terrestrial planet connection
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…
Thousands of exoplanets have been found with many widely different from the ones in our own system. Despite the success, systems with planets in wide orbits analogous to those of Jupiter and Saturn, in the critical first several hundred…
Theories of planet formation predict the birth of giant planets in the inner, dense, and gas-rich regions of the circumstellar disks around young stars. These are the regions from which strong CO emission is expected. Observations have so…
Debris discs are dusty belts of planetesimals around main-sequence stars, similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our solar system. The planetesimals cannot be observed directly, yet they produce detectable dust in mutual collisions.…
Gravitational instability has been invoked as a possible mechanism of giant planet formation in protoplanetary disks. Here we critically revise its viability by noting that for the direct production of giant planets it is not enough for…
We discuss the properties of several circumstellar debris disk systems imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer in a survey of young stars with known far-IR excesses. These dusty disks…
The core-accretion mechanism for gas giant formation may be too slow to create all observed gas giant planets during reasonable gas disk lifetimes, but it has yet to be firmly established that the disk instability model can produce…
The discovery of over 400 extrasolar planets allows us to statistically test our understanding of formation and dynamics of planetary systems via numerical simulations. Traditional N-body simulations of multiple-planet systems without gas…
In this paper, we present results from a multi-stage numerical campaign to begin to explain and determine why extreme debris disk detections are rare, what types of impacts will result in extreme debris disks and what we can learn about the…
Most stars form in embedded clusters. Stellar flybys may affect the orbital architecture of the systems by exciting the eccentricity and causing dynamical instability. Since, incidentally, the timescale over which a cluster loses its…
Terrestrial planets form in a series of dynamical steps from the solid component of circumstellar disks. First, km-sized planetesimals form likely via a combination of sticky collisions, turbulent concentration of solids, and gravitational…
Recent advances in astronomical instrumentation mean that we are now able to image the thermal emission from the disks of dust around main sequence stars that may be the fossil remnants of planetary formation. These observations imply that…
We explore the evolution of a giant planet that interacts with a circumbinary disc that orbits a misaligned binary by means of analytic models and hydrodynamical simulations. Planet-disc interactions lead to mutual tilt oscillations between…
Models of planet formation have shown that giant planets have a large impact on the number, masses and orbits of terrestrial planets that form. In addition, they play an important role in delivering volatiles from material that formed…
The ensemble of now more than 250 discovered planetary systems displays a wide range of masses, orbits and, in multiple systems, dynamical interactions. These represent the end point of a complex sequence of events, wherein an entire…
The orbital eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is shaped by a combination of dynamical processes, reflecting both formation conditions and long-term evolution. Probing the orbital dynamics of planets in the kinematic thin and thick…
Resolved images suggest that asymmetric structures are a common feature of cold debris disks. While planets close to these disks are rarely detected, their hidden presence and gravitational perturbations provide plausible explanations for…
Disk instability is an attractive yet controversial means for the rapid formation of giant planets in our solar system and elsewhere. Recent concerns regarding the first adiabatic exponent of molecular hydrogen gas are addressed and shown…
We have bandmerged candidate transiting planetary systems (from the Kepler satellite) and confirmed transiting planetary systems (from the literature) with the recent Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) preliminary release catalog.…
Planet perturbations are often invoked as a potential explanation for many spatial structures that have been imaged in debris discs. So far this issue has been mostly investigated with collisionless N-body numerical models. We numerically…