Related papers: Building Terrestrial Planets
The inner solar system's modern orbital architecture provides inferences into the epoch of terrestrial planet formation; a ~100 Myr time period of planet growth via collisions with planetesimals and other proto-planets. While classic…
The terrestrial planets formed by accretion of asteroid-like objects within the inner solar system's protoplanetary disk. Previous works have found that forming a small-mass Mars requires the disk to contain little mass beyond ~1.5 au…
Terrestrial planet formation (TPF) is a difficult problem that has vexed researchers for decades. Numerical models are only partially successful at reproducing the orbital architecture of the inner planets, but have generally not considered…
The initial conditions, physics, and outcome of planet formation are now constrained by detailed observations of protoplanetary disks, laboratory experiments, and the discovery of thousands of extrasolar planetary systems. These…
Newly-formed planetary systems with ages of <10 Myr offer many unique insights into the formation, evolution, and fundamental properties of extrasolar planets. These planets have fallen beyond the limits of past surveys, but as we enter the…
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…
The formation of giant planets requires accumulation of ~10 Earth mass in solids; but how do protoplanets acquire their mass? There are many, often competing processes that regulate the accretion rate of protoplanets. To assess their…
With n-body simulations, we model terrestrial circumbinary planet (CBP) formation with an initial surface density profile motivated by hydrodynamic circumbinary gas disc simulations. The binary plays an important role in shaping the initial…
Giant planets dominate the mass of many planetary systems, including the Solar System, and represent the best-characterized class of extrasolar planets. Understanding the formation of giant planets bridges the high mass end of the planet…
Gas giant planets play a fundamental role in shaping the orbital architecture of planetary systems and in affecting the delivery of volatile materials to terrestrial planets in the habitable zones. Current theories of gas giant planet…
Recent exoplanet surveys revealed that for solar-type stars, close-in Super-Earths are ubiquitous and many of them are in multi-planet systems. These systems are more compact than the Solar System's terrestrial planets. However, there have…
Jupiter and Saturn formed in a few million years (Haisch et al. 2001) from a gas-dominated protoplanetary disk, and were susceptible to gas-driven migration of their orbits on timescales of only ~100,000 years (Armitage 2007). Hydrodynamic…
Recent three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamical simulations have identified a disk wind by which gas materials are lost from the surface of a protoplanetary disk, which can significantly alter the evolution of the inner disk and the…
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…
In the past two decades, transit surveys have revealed a class of planets with thick atmospheres -- sub-Neptunes -- that must have completed their accretion in protoplanet disks. When planets form in the gaseous disk, the gravitational…
The ``minimum-mass solar nebula'' (MMSN) model estimates the surface density distribution of the protoplanetary disk by assuming the planets to have formed in situ. However, significant radial migration of the giant planets likely occurred…
Understanding the concept of habitability is related to an evolutionary knowledge of the particular planet-in-question. Additional indications so-called "systemic aspects" of the planetary system as a whole governs a particular planet's…
One of the most challenging problems we face in our understanding of planet formation is how Jupiter and Saturn could have formed before the the solar nebula dispersed. The most popular model of giant planet formation is the so-called 'core…
The recent detection of planets around very low mass stars raises the question of the formation, composition and potential habitability of these objects. We use planetary system formation models to infer the properties, in particular their…
The solar system's dynamical state can be explained by an orbital instability among the giant planets. A recent model has proposed that the giant planet instability happened during terrestrial planet formation. This scenario has been shown…