Related papers: The debris disk - terrestrial planet connection
The formation of planets like Earth is expected to conclude with a series of late-stage giant impacts that generate warm dusty debris, the most anticipated visible signpost of terrestrial planet formation in progress. While there is now…
We analyze two new sets of coagulation calculations for solid particles orbiting within the terrestrial zone of a solar-type star. In models of collisional cascades, numerical simulations demonstrate that the total mass, the mass in 1 mm…
(Abridged) A numerical model of a circumstellar debris disk is developed and applied to observations of the circumstellar dust orbiting beta Pictoris. The model accounts for the rates at which dust is produced by collisions among unseen…
Extreme debris disks can show short term behaviour through the evolution and clearing of small grains produced in giant impacts, and potentially a longer period of variability caused by a planetesimal population formed from giant impact…
Mass and radius of planets transiting their host stars are provided by radial velocity and photometric observations. Structural models of solid exoplanet interiors are then constructed by using equations of state for the radial density…
The giant planets of the solar system likely played a large role in shaping the architecture of the terrestrial planets. Using an updated collision model, we conduct a suite of high resolution N-body integrations to probe the relationship…
The high eccentricities of the known extrasolar planets remain largely unexplained. We explore the possibility that eccentricities are excited in the outer parts of an extended planetary disk by encounters with stars passing at a few…
The interstellar thick disks of galaxies contain not only gas, but significant quantities of dust. Most of our knowledge of extraplanar dust in disk galaxies comes from direct broadband optical imaging of these systems, wherein the dust is…
Exoplanetary systems host giant planets on substantially non-circular, close-in orbits. We propose that these eccentricities arise in a phase of giant impacts, analogous to the final stage of Solar System assembly that formed Earth's Moon.…
Two fundamentally different processes of rocky planet formation exist, but it is unclear which one built the terrestrial planets of the solar system. Either they formed by collisions among planetary embryos from the inner solar system, or…
The last several years have brought about a dynamic shift in the view of exoplanetary systems in the post-main sequence, perhaps epitomized by the evidence for surviving rocky planetary bodies at white dwarfs. Coinciding with the launch of…
Resolved debris disk features (e.g., warps, offsets, edges and gaps, azimuthal asymmetries, radially thickened rings, scale heights) contain valuable information about the underlying planetary systems, such as the posited planet's mass,…
A gap in exoplanets' radius distribution has been widely attributed to the photo-evaporation threshold of their progenitors' gaseous envelope. Giant impacts can also lead to substantial mass-loss. The outflowing gas endures tidal torque…
(Abridged) In planetary systems with two or more giant planets, dynamical instabilities can lead to collisions or ejections through strong planet--planet scattering. Previous studies for simple initial configurations with two equal-mass…
Substantial orbital migration of massive planets may occur in most extrasolar planetary systems. Since migration is likely to occur after a significant fraction of the dust has been locked up into planetesimals, ubiquitous migration could…
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…
The standard picture of planet formation posits that giant gas planets are over-grown rocky planets massive enough to attract enormous gas atmospheres. It has been shown recently that the opposite point of view is physically plausible: the…
The late-stage formation of giant planetary systems is rich in interesting dynamical mechanisms. Previous simulations of three giant planets initially on quasi-circular and quasi-coplanar orbits in the gas disc have shown that highly…
Planets embedded within debris disks gravitationally perturb nearby dust and can create clumpy, azimuthally asymmetric circumstellar ring structures that rotate in lock with the planet. The Earth creates one such structure in the solar…
Planets are common objects in the Universe, observationally as well as theoretically. However, the standard theory of their formation encounters many difficulties, such as dust fall and disk lifetime problems. We positively analyze them,…