Related papers: Planetary Rings
The recent detections of extrasolar giant planets has revealed a surprising diversity of planetary system architectures, with many very unlike our Solar System. Understanding the origin of this diversity requires multi-wavelength studies of…
Despite the recent discoveries of planets orbiting stars at all evolutionary stages, the evolution of planetary systems remains poorly understood. Studying planetary systems around red giant branch stars can reveal how main sequence…
Planet-disk interaction predicts a change in the orbital elements of an embedded planet. Through linear and fully hydrodynamical studies it has been found that migration is typically directed inwards. Hence, this migration process gives…
'Debris disks' are collections of small bodies around stars, such as the Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt in our Solar System. These disks are composed of objects smaller than planets, including asteroids, comets, dust, and dwarf planets. We…
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…
The discovery of planets orbiting at less than 1 au from their host star and less massive than Saturn in various exoplanetary systems revolutionized our theories of planetary formation. The fundamental question is whether these close-in…
We develop a simple model of planetary formation, focusing our attention on those planets with masses less than 10 Earth masses and studying particularly the primordial spin parameters of planets resulting from the accretion of…
Recent direct imaging discoveries suggest a new class of massive, distant planets around A stars. These widely separated giants have been interpreted as signs of planet formation driven by gravitational instability, but the viability of…
Drastic changes in protoplanets' orbits could occur in the early stages of planetary systems through interactions with other planets and their surrounding protoplanetary or debris discs. The resulting planetary system could exhibit orbits…
Planetary rings are ubiquitous structure in our Solar System, but their formation mechanisms remain under debate. One of the proposed scenarios is the tidal disruption of a nearby passing body that enters within a planet's Roche limit,…
A key challenge for protoplanetary disks and planet formation models is to be able to make a reliable connection between observed structures in the disks emission, like bright and dark rings or asymmetries, and the supposed existence of…
Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar System's Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is…
The Galaxy's most common known planetary systems have several Earth-to-Neptune-size planets in compact orbits. At small orbital separations, larger planets are less common than their smaller counterparts by an order of magnitude. The young…
Dust in debris disks is generated by collisions among planetesimals. The existence of these planetesimals is a consequence of the planet formation process, but the relationship between debris disks and planets has not been clearly…
Searches for planets in close binary systems explore the degree to which stellar multiplicity inhibits or promotes planet formation. There is a degeneracy between planet formation models when only systems with single stars are…
The recent discovery of narrow rings around minor bodies has raised many questions regarding their origin and current dynamics. Sharp ring boundaries seem indicative of shepherding moonlets, but none have been found. All rings lie close to…
Optically thin dusty disks around Main Sequence stars consist of debris from catastrophic collisions or from low erosion of long-lived planetesimals. Resolved observations of dusty disks have systematically evidenced asymmetries and annular…
Extrasolar debris disks are detected by observing dust, which is thought to be released during planetesimal collisions. This implies that planetesimals are dynamically excited ("stirred"), such that collisions are sufficiently common and…
The nearby main sequence star Beta Pictoris is surrounded by an edge-on disk of dust produced by the collisional erosion of larger planetesimals. Here we report the discovery of substructure within the northeast extension of the disk…
We study the orbital evolution and mass growth of protoplanets with masses $M \in [0.1-8]$~M$_\oplus$ in the vicinity of a dusty ring, using three-dimensional numerical simulations with a two-fluid model and nested-meshes. We find two…