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For centuries, our knowledge of planetary systems and ideas about planet formation were based on a single example, our solar system. During the last thirteen years, the discovery of ~170 planetary systems has ushered in a new era for…
The past decade has seen major progress in our understanding of terrestrial planet formation. Yet key questions remain. In this review we first address the growth of 100 km-scale planetesimals as a consequence of dust coagulation and…
The formation of planets is one of the major unsolved problems in modern astrophysics. Planets are believed to form out of the material in circumstellar disks known to exist around young stars, and which are a by-product of the star…
The goal of planet formation as a field of study is not only to provide the understanding of how planets come into existence. It is also an interdisciplinary bridge which links astronomy to geology and mineralogy. Recent observations of…
Observations of circumstellar disks around stars as a function of stellar properties such as mass, metallicity, multiplicity, and age, provide constraints on theories concerning the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Utilizing…
The study of satellite galaxies can provide information on the merging and aggregation processes which, according to the hierarchical clustering models, form the larger spiral galaxies we observe. With the aim of testing hierarchical models…
All circumbinary planets currently detected are in orbits that are almost coplanar to the binary orbit. While misaligned circumbinary planets are more difficult to detect, observations of polar aligned circumbinary gas and debris disks…
Planets are formed from collisional growth of small bodies in a protoplanetary disk. Bodies much larger than approximately $1$\,m are mainly controlled by the gravity of the host star and experience weak gas drag; their orbits are mainly…
A survey of currently known planet-hosting stars indicates that approximately 25% of extrasolar planetary systems are within dual-star environments. Several of these systems contain stellar companions on moderately close orbits, implying…
We know that giant planets played a crucial role in the making of our Solar System. The discovery of giant planets orbiting other stars is a formidable opportunity to learn more about these objects, what is their composition, how various…
Terrestrial planetary systems may exist around nearby stars as the Earth-sized counterparts to the many giant planets already discovered within the solar neighborhood. In this chapter we first discuss the numerous techniques which have been…
Half the known extrasolar planets have orbital eccentricities in excess of 0.3. Such large eccentricities are surprising as it is thought that planets form in a protoplanetary disk on nearly circular orbits much like the current states of…
Exoplanets are typically thought to form in protoplanetary disks left over from protostellar disk of their newly formed host star. However, additional planetary formation and evolution routes may exist in old evolved binary systems. Here we…
The discovery of the first extra-solar planet surrounding a main-sequence star was announced in 1995, based on very precise radial velocity (Doppler) measurements. A total of 34 such planets were known by the end of March 2000, and their…
Planets are typically thought to form in protoplanetary disks left over from protostellar disk of their newly formed host star. However, an additional planetary formation route may exist in old evolved binary systems. In such systems…
Assuming that an unknown mechanism (e.g., gas turbulence) removes most of the subnebula gas disk in a timescale shorter than that for satellite formation, we develop a model for the formation of regular (and possibly at least some of the…
Over the past two decades, large strides have been made in the field of planet formation. Yet fundamental questions remain. Here we review our state of understanding of five fundamental bottlenecks in planet formation. These are: 1) the…
We calculate herein the late stages of terrestrial planet accumulation around a solar type star that has a binary companion with semimajor axis larger than the terrestrial planet region. We perform more than one hundred simulations to…
When extrasolar planets are observed to transit their parent stars, we are granted unprecedented access to their physical properties. It is only for transiting planets that we are permitted direct estimates of the planetary masses and…
One of the most surprising discoveries of extrasolar planets is the detection of planets in moderately close binary star systems. The Jovian-type planets in the two binaries of Gamma Cephei and GJ 86 have brought to the forefront questions…