Related papers: Explaining Mercury's Density through Magnetic Eros…
How to create planetesimals from tiny dust particles in a proto-planetary disk before the dust particles spiral to the central star is one of the most challenging problems in the theory of planetary system formation. In our previous paper…
The Earth, Venus, Mars, and some extrasolar terrestrial planets have a mass and radius that is consistent with a mass fraction of about 30% metallic core and 70% silicate mantle. At the inner frontier of the solar system, Mercury has a…
Recent observations of protoplanetary disks have revealed ring-like structures that can be associated to pressure maxima. Pressure maxima are known to be dust collectors and planet migration traps. Most of planet formation works are based…
Giant planet atmospheres are thought to reflect the gas phase composition of the disk when and where they formed. However, these atmospheres may also be polluted via solid accretion or ice sublimation in the disk. Here, we propose a novel…
Mid-infrared spectra of 65 T Tauri stars (TTS) taken with the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) on board the Spitzer Space Telescope are modeled using dust at two temperatures to probe the radial variation in dust composition in the uppermost…
The solid content of circumstellar disks is inherited from the interstellar medium: dust particles of at most a micrometer in size. Protoplanetary disks are the environment where these dust grains need to grow at least 13 orders of…
During the formation of rocky planets, the surface environments of growing protoplanets were dramatically different from those of present-day planets. The release of gravitational energy during accretion would have maintained a molten…
A significant fraction of main sequence stars observed interferometrically in the near infrared have slightly extended components that have been attributed to very hot dust. To match the spectrum appears to require the presence of large…
It has been shown that a realistic level of magnetization of dense molecular cloud cores can suppress the formation of a rotationally supported disk (RSD) through catastrophic magnetic braking in the axisymmetric ideal MHD limit. In this…
We carry out three dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to study the role of gravitational and drag forces on the concentration of large dust grains (St > 1) in the spiral arms of gravitationally unstable protoplanetary…
Sedimentation rates of silicate grains in gas giant protoplanets formed by disk instability are calculated for protoplanetary masses between 1 M_Saturn to 10 M_Jupiter. Giant protoplanets with masses of 5 M_Jupiter or larger are found to be…
A significant fraction of white dwarfs show metal lines indicative of pollution with planetary material but the accretion process remains poorly understood. The main aim of this paper is to produce a road-map illustrating several potential…
Whether the higher occurrence of giant planets being hosted by metal-rich versus metal-poor stars results from formation or from "pollution" has been a question of intense debate. We present new patterns that emerge when planet/star systems…
The prevalence of short-period super-Earths that are independent of host metallicity challenges the theoretical construction of their origin. We propose that dust trapping in the global pressure bump induced by magnetospheric truncation in…
Current protoplanetary dust coagulation theory does not predict dry silicate planetesimals, in tension with the Earth. While remedies to this predicament have been proposed, they have generally failed numerical studies, or are in tension…
The formation and evolution of a circumstellar disk in magnetized cloud cores is investigated from prestellar core stage until sim 10^4 yr after protostar formation. In the circumstellar disk, fragmentation first occurs due to gravitational…
Complex structures, including sharp edges, rings and gaps, have been commonly observed in protoplanetary disks with or without planetary candidates. Here we consider the possibility that they are the intrinsic consequences of angular…
Gravitational torques between a planet and gas in the protoplanetary disk result in orbital migration of the planet, and are likely to play an important role in the formation and early evolution of planetary systems. For masses comparable…
The similar orbital distances and detection rates of debris disks and the prominent rings observed in protoplanetary disks suggest a potential connection between these structures. We explore this connection with new calculations that follow…
Late accretion is a process that strongly modulated surface geomorphic and geochemical features of Mercury. Yet, the fate of the impactors and their effects on Mercury's surface through the bombardment epoch are not clear. Using Monte-Carlo…