Related papers: Effects of a planetesimal debris disk on stability…
We present results of extensive numerical studies of the stability of non-interacting particles in the planetary systems of stars Upsilon Andromedae, GJ 876, 47 UMa, and 55 Cancri. We discuss the possibility of the existence of islands of…
The detection of many extrasolar gas giants with high eccentricities indicates that dynamical instabilities in planetary systems are common. These instabilities can alter the orbits of gas giants as well as the orbits of terrestrial planets…
Debris discs are our best means to probe the outer regions of planetary systems. Many studies assume that planets lie at the inner edges of debris discs, akin to Neptune and the Kuiper Belt, and use the disc morphologies to constrain those…
Modern studies of the early solar system routinely invoke the possibility of an orbital instability among the giant planets triggered by gravitational interactions between the planets and a massive exterior disk of planetesimals. Previous…
Debris disks are exoplanetary systems containing planets, minor bodies (such as asteroids and comets) and debris dust. Unseen planets are presumed to perturb the minor bodies into crossing orbits, generating small dust grains that are…
Debris disks are dusty, optically thin structures around main sequence stars. HD 106906AB is a short-period stellar binary, host to a wide separation planet, HD 106906b, and a debris disk. Only a few known systems include a debris disk and…
We investigate the effects of a passing stellar encounter on a planetesimal disk through analytical calculations and numerical simulations, and derive the boundary radius ($a_{\rm planet}$) outside which planet formation is inhibited by…
The presence of planets around solar-type stars suggests that many white dwarfs should have relic planetary systems. While planets closer than $\sim$ 5~AU will most likely not survive the post-main sequence lifetime of its parent star, any…
Nowadays, many extrasolar planetary systems possessing at least one planet on a highly eccentric orbit have been discovered. In this work, we study the possible long-term stability of such systems. We consider the general three body problem…
The dust disks observed around mature stars are evidence that plantesimals are present in these systems on spatial scales that are similar to that of the asteroids and the KBOs in the Solar System. These dust disks (a.k.a. ``debris disks'')…
There is currently debate over whether the dust content of planetary systems is stochastically regenerated or originates in planetesimal belts evolving in steady state. In this paper a simple model for the steady state evolution of debris…
Many white dwarf stars show signs of having accreted smaller bodies, implying that they may host planetary systems. A small number of these systems contain gaseous debris discs, visible through emission lines. We report a stable 123.4min…
We study the orbital evolution of the 4 giant planets of our solar system in a gas disk. Our investigation extends the previous works by Masset and Snellgrove (2001) and Morbidelli and Crida (2007, MC07), which focussed on the dynamics of…
HR 8799 harbors arguably the first and best-studied directly-imaged planets. In this brief article, I describe how the HR 8799 planetary system is a benchmark system for studying the atmospheres, orbital properties, dynamical stability, and…
Recent advances in astronomical instrumentation mean that we are now able to image the thermal emission from the disks of dust around main sequence stars that may be the fossil remnants of planetary formation. These observations imply that…
Most stars form in star clusters and stellar associated. To understand the roles of star cluster environments in shaping the dynamical evolution of planetary systems, we carry out direct $N$-body simulations of four planetary systems models…
Recently, a new planet candidate was discovered on direct images around the young (10-17 Myr) A-type star HD95086. The strong infrared excess of the system indicates that, similarly to HR8799, {\ss} Pic, and Fomalhaut, the star harbors a…
We simulated the long-term collisional depletion of debris disks around solar-type (G2V) stars with our code. The numerical results were supplemented by, and interpreted through, a new analytic model. A few general scaling rules for the…
We have shown that Earth-mass planets could survive in variously restricted regions of the habitable zones (HZs) of most of a sample of nine of the 93 main-sequence exoplanetary systems confirmed by May 2003. In a preliminary extrapolation…
Debris disks, which are optically thin, dusty disks around main sequence stars, are often found to have structures and/or asymmetries associated with planet-disk interactions. Debris disk morphologies can hence be used as probes for planets…