Related papers: Stirring up the dust: A dynamical model for halo-l…

Stellar flybys in star clusters are suspected to affect the orbital architecture of planetary systems causing eccentricity excitation and orbital misalignment between the planet orbit and the equatorial plane of the star. We explore whether…

Wide or fragile pairs are sensitive probes of the galactic potential, and they have been used to provide information about the galactic tidal field, the density of GMC and the masses of dark matter perturbers present in both the disk and…

Hydrodynamical simulations of two giant planets embedded in a gaseous disk have shown that in case of a smooth convergent migration they end up trapped into a mean motion resonance. These findings have led to the conviction that the onset…

Context. Young Stellar Objects (YSOs) are observed to undergo powerful accretion events known as FU Orionis outbursts (FUors). Such events of episodic accretion are now considered to be common during low mass star formation, wherein the…

A clear understanding of the chemical processing of matter, as it is transferred from a molecular cloud to a planetary system, depends heavily on knowledge of the physical conditions endured by gas and dust as these accrete onto a disk and…

Spatially resolved polarized (sub-)mm emission has been observed for example in the protoplanetary disk around HL Tau. Magnetically aligned grains are commonly interpreted as the source of polarization. However, self-scattering by large…

According to the canonical planet formation theory, planets form "in-situ" within a planetesimal disk via runaway and oligarchic growth. This theory, however, cannot naturally account for the formation timescale of ice giants or the…

Planets that are embedded in the changing magnetic fields of their host stars can experience significant induction heating in their interiors caused by the planet's orbital motion. For induction heating to be substantial, the planetary…

The evolution of protoplanetary disks, especially in the early stages of planetary formation, as dust grows, is the cornerstone of the birth of planets. The mechanisms involved in the growth of sub-micrometric dust grains into planetesimals…

The thesis deals with the first stage of planet formation, namely dust coagulation from micron to millimeter sizes in circumstellar disks. For the first time, we collect and compile the recent laboratory experiments on dust aggregates into…

Transitional disks represent a short stage of the evolution of circumstellar material. Studies of dust grains in these objects can provide pivotal information on the mechanisms of planet formation. Dissimilarities in the spatial…

Transition disks form a special class of protoplanetary disks that are characterized by a deficiency of disk material close to the star. In a subgroup, inner holes in these disks can stretch out to a few tens of au while there is still mass…

Young stellar objects (YSOs) may not accumulate their mass steadily, as was previously thought, but in a series of violent events manifesting themselves as sharp stellar brightening. These events can be caused by fragmentation due to…

This tutorial is an introduction to observational studies of dust transport and evolution in protoplanetary disks. Spatially resolved observations of disks at multiple wavelengths can allow to infer the distribution of various dust grains…

The persistence of planetary systems after their host stars evolve into their post-main sequence phase is poorly constrained by observations. Many young white dwarf systems exhibit infrared excess emission and/or spectral absorption lines…

The Sun and >15 percent of nearby stars are surrounded by dusty debris disks that must be collisionally replenished by asteroids and comets, as the dust would otherwise be depleted on <10 Myr timescales (ref. 1). Theoretical studies show…

Dust constitutes only about one percent of the mass of circumstellar disks, yet it is of crucial importance for the modeling of planet formation, disk chemistry, radiative transfer and observations. The initial growth of dust from…

Cold outer debris belts orbit a significant fraction of stars, many of which are planet-hosts. Radiative forces from the star lead to dust particles leaving the outer belts and spiralling inwards under Poynting-Robertson drag. We present an…

Starting from planetary systems with three giant planets and an outer disk of planetesimals, we use dynamical simulations to show how dynamical instabilities can transform planetesimal disks into 100-1000 AU-scale isotropic clouds. The…

Transition disks, with inner regions depleted in dust and gas, could represent later stages of protoplanetary disk evolution when newly-formed planets are emerging. The PDS 70 system has attracted particular interest because of the presence…