Related papers: How do Most Planets Form? -- Constraints on Disk I…
NASA's Kepler Mission uncovered a wealth of planetary systems, many with planets on short-period orbits. These short-period systems reside around 50% of Sun-like stars and are similarly prevalent around M dwarfs. Their formation and…
Galaxies above redshift 1 can be very clumpy, with irregular morphologies dominated by star complexes as large as 2 kpc and as massive as a few 10^8 or 10^9 Mo. Their co-moving densities and rapid evolution suggest that most present-day…
Planet formation is directly linked to the birthing environment that protoplanetary disks provide. The disk properties determine whether a giant planet will form and how it evolves. The number of exoplanet and disk observations is…
Planets form in protoplanetary discs. Their masses, distribution, and orbits sensitively depend on the structure of the protoplanetary discs. However, what sets the initial structure of the discs in terms of mass, radius and accretion rate…
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 study rapidly accreting, gravitationally unstable disks with a series of global, three dimensional, numerical experiments using the code ORION. In this paper we conduct a numerical parameter study focused on protostellar disks, and show…
(Abridged) We present numerical simulations of the formation of the planetary companions to 47 UMa, rho CrB, and 51 Peg. They are assumed to have formed in situ according to the basic model that a core formed first by accretion of solid…
Fragmentation in a gravitationally unstable accretion disk can be an important pathway for forming stellar/planetary companions. To characterize quantitatively the condition for and outcome of fragmentation under realistic thermodynamics,…
We have investigated the problem of the distribution of both masses and orbital radii of planets resulting from the gas-accretion, gas-capture model. First we followed the evolution of gas and solids from the moment where all solids are in…
Motivated by the recent discovery of massive planets on wide orbits, we present a mechanism for the formation of such planets via disk fragmentation in the embedded phase of star formation. In this phase, the forming disk intensively…
The study of protoplanetary disc evolution and planet formation has mainly concentrated on solar (and low) mass stars since they host the majority of the confirmed exoplanets. Nevertheless, the numerous planets found orbiting stars up to…
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…
Measured disk masses seem to be too low to form the observed population of planetary systems. In this context, we develop a population synthesis code in the pebble accretion scenario, to analyse the disk mass dependence on planet formation…
Direct imaging searches have revealed many very low-mass objects, including a small number of planetary mass objects, as wide-orbit companions to young stars. The formation mechanism of these objects remains uncertain. In this paper we…
In the core accretion scenario of planet formation, rocky cores grow by first accreting solids until they are massive enough to accrete gas. For giant planet formation this means that a massive core must form within the lifetime of the gas…
With hundreds of exoplanets detected, it is necessary to revisit giant planets accretion models to explain their mass distribution. In particular, formation of sub-jovian planets remains unclear, given the short timescale for the runaway…
Planets are thought to form via accretion from a remnant disk of gas and solids around a newly formed star. During this process material in the disk either remains bound to the star as part of either a planet, a smaller celestial body, or…
The apparent dependence of detection frequency of extrasolar planets on the metallicity of their host stars is investigated with Monte Carlo simulations using a deterministic core-accretion planet formation model. According to this model,…
[Abridged] Star and planet formation are the complex outcomes of gravitational collapse and angular momentum transport mediated by protostellar and protoplanetary disks. In this review we focus on the role of gravitational instability in…
While the recent microlensing discoveries of super-Earths orbiting two M dwarf stars have been taken as support for the core accretion mechanism of giant planet formation, we show here that these planets could also have been formed by the…