Related papers: Young Solar System's Fifth Giant Planet?
Celestial bodies with a mass of M ~ 10 M_Jup have been found orbiting nearby stars. It is unknown whether these objects formed like gas-giant planets through core accretion or like stars through gravitational instability. I show that…
The limited completeness of the Kepler sample for planets with orbital periods $\gtrsim$ 1 yr leaves open the possibility that exoplanetary systems may host undetected giant planets. Should such planets exist, their dynamical interactions…
It has been proposed recently that the first step in the formation of both rocky and gas giant planets is dust sedimentation into a solid core inside a gas clump (giant planet embryo). The clumps are then assumed to migrate closer to the…
Seismology applied to giant planets could drastically change our understanding of their deep interiors, as it has happened with the Earth, the Sun, and many main-sequence and evolved stars. The study of giant planets' composition is…
Massive cores of the giant planets are thought to have formed in a gas disk by accretion of pebble-size particles whose accretional cross-section is enhanced by aerodynamic gas drag [1][2]. A commonly held view is that the terrestrial…
The small bodies in the Kuiper Belt region of the distant Solar System are leftovers from planet formation. Their orbital distribution today tells us about how giant planets migrated, while their surface properties, shapes, and sizes tell…
The formation of cold gas giants similar to Jupiter and Saturn in orbit and mass is a great challenge for planetesimal-driven core accretion models because the core growth rates far from the star are low. Here we model the growth and…
Modeling the formation of cold giant planets around M dwarfs is difficult because their disks may not contain enough solids to form massive cores and because forming giants are expected to migrate inward through disk interactions. It is…
In a recent paper we proposed that the giant planets' primordial orbits may have been eccentric (~0.05), and used a suite of dynamical simulations to show outcomes of the giant planet instability that are consistent with their present-day…
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…
Giant planet migration appears widespread among planetary systems in our Galaxy. However, the timescales of this process, which reflect the underlying dynamical mechanisms, are not well constrained, even within the solar system. Since…
In the Nice model of solar system formation, Uranus and Neptune undergo an orbital upheaval, sweeping through a planetesimal disk. The region of the disk from which material is accreted by the ice giants during this phase of their evolution…
Advances in the discovery and characterization of asteroids over the past decade have revealed an unanticipated underlying structure that points to a dramatic early history of the inner Solar System. The asteroids in the main asteroid belt…
Radial velocity and transit surveys indicate that solar-type stars bear super-Earths, with mass and period up to ~ 20 M_E and a few months, are more common than those with Jupiter-mass gas giants. In many cases, these super-Earths are…
The Sun shows a $\sim 10$% depletion in refractory elements relative to nearby solar twins. It has been suggested that this depletion is a signpost of planet formation. The exoplanet statistics are now good enough to show that the origin of…
In this review, three major changes in our understanding of the early history of the Solar System are presented. 1) Early differentiation: A few recent results support the idea that protoplanet formation and differentiation occurred partly…
The accretion ages of the first planetesimals-the parent bodies of magmatic iron meteorites-suggest they formed within the first 0.5-1 Myr of Solar System history. Yet, planetesimal formation appears to have occurred in at least two…
The orbital structure of the asteroid belt holds a record of the Solar System's dynamical history. The current belt only contains ${\rm \sim 10^{-3}}$ Earth masses yet the asteroids' orbits are dynamically excited, with a large spread in…
Although the long-term numerical integrations of planetary orbits indicate that our planetary system is dynamically stable at least +/- Gyr, the dynamics of our Solar System includes both chaotic and stable motions: the large planets…
The origin of Jupiter-mass planets with orbital periods of only a few days is still uncertain. It is widely believed that these planets formed near the water-ice line of the protoplanetary disk, and subsequently migrated into much smaller…