Related papers: Debris from terrestrial planet formation: the Moon…

Stars form with gaseous and dusty circumstellar envelopes, which rapidly settle into disks that eventually give rise to planetary systems. Understanding the process by which these disks evolve is paramount in developing an accurate theory…

The eccentric orbits of the known extrasolar giant planets provide evidence that most planet-forming environments undergo violent dynamical instabilities. Here, we numerically simulate the impact of giant planet instabilities on planetary…

The motion of bodies ejected from the Earth was studied, and the probabilities of collisions of such bodies with the present terrestrial planets were calculated. The dependences of these probabilities on velocities, angles and points of…

The last phase of the formation of rocky planets is dominated by collisions among Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos. Simulations of this phase need to handle the difficulty of including the post-impact material without saturating the…

Giant impacts between planetary embryos are a natural step in the terrestrial planet formation process and are expected to create disks of warm debris in the terrestrial regions of their stars. Understanding the gas and dust debris produced…

During the late stage of planet formation when Mars-size cores appear, interactions among planetary cores can excite their orbital eccentricities, speed their merges and thus sculpture the final architecture of planet systems. This series…

The classical scenario of terrestrial planet formation is characterized by a phase of giant impacts among Moon-to-Mars mass planetary embryos. While the classic model and its adaptations have produced adequate analogs of the outer three…

We use a new multiannulus planetesimal accretion code to investigate the evolution of a planetesimal disk following a moderately close encounter with a passing star. The calculations include fragmentation, gas and Poynting-Robertson drag,…

We investigate the possibility that the Moon's formation impact was triggered by an early dynamical instability of the giant planets. We consider the well-studied "jumping Jupiter" hypothesis for the solar system's instability, where…

Of the few thousand discovered exoplanets, a significant number orbit in the habitable zone of their star. Many of them are gas giants lacking a rocky surface and solid water reservoirs necessary for life as we know it. The search for…

The formation of gas giant planets must occur during the first few Myr of a star's lifetime, when the protoplanetary disc still contains sufficient gas to be accreted onto the planetary core. The majority of protoplanetary discs are exposed…

Interplanetary dust in the inner solar system originates from multiple sources, including short-period comets and main-belt asteroids. In this work, we focus specifically on the dynamical evolution of asteroid-derived dust using N-body…

Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…

Theories of the formation and early evolution of planetary systems postulate that planets are born in circumstellar disks, and undergo radial migration during and after dissipation of the dust and gas disk from which they formed. The…

The mass of solids in a young circumstellar disc may be the key factor in its efficiency in building planetesimals and planetary cores, and dust observed around young T Tauri and Herbig Ae stars can be used as a proxy for this initial solid…

Numerical simulations of the stochastic end stage of planet formation typically begin with a population of embryos and planetesimals that grow into planets by merging. We analyzed the impact parameters of collisions leading to the growth of…

Planets grow in rotating disks of dust and gas around forming stars, some of which can subsequently collide in giant impacts after the gas component is removed from the disk. Monitoring programs with the warm Spitzer mission have recorded…

Exomoons orbiting terrestrial or super-terrestrial exoplanets have not yet been discovered; their possible existence and properties are therefore still an unresolved question. Here we explore the collisional formation of exomoons through…

Pressure is a key parameter in the physics and chemistry of planet formation and evolution. Previous studies have erroneously assumed that internal pressures monotonically increase with the mass of a body. Using smoothed particle…

In the leading theory of lunar formation, known as the giant impact hypothesis, a collision between two planet-size objects resulted in a young Earth surrounded by a circumplanetary debris disk from which the Moon later accreted. The range…