Related papers: The Science Case for the Planet Formation Imager (…
Several studies, observational and theoretical, suggest that planetary systems with only rocky planets should be the most common in the Universe. We study the diversity of planetary systems that might form around Sun-like stars in low-mass…
The mechanisms of planet formation are still under debate. We know little about how planets form, even if more than 4000 exoplanets have been detected to date. Recent investigations target the cot of newly born planets: the protoplanetary…
Planetary systems, ours included, are formed in disks of dust and gas around young stars. Disks are an integral part of the star and planet formation process, and knowledge of the distribution and temperature of inner disk material is…
Recent observations from NASA's Kepler mission detected the first planets in circumbinary orbits. The question we try to answer is where these planets formed in the circumbinary disk and how far inside they migrated to reach their present…
Current theory of disk galaxy formation is used to study fundamental-plane (FP) type of relations for disk galaxies. We examine how the changes in model parameters affect these relations and explore the possibility of using such relations…
The dynamics of planetesimals plays an important role in planet formation, because their velocity distribution sets the growth rate to larger bodies. When planetesimals form in protoplanetary discs, their orbits are nearly circular and…
This work is the second part of a project that attempts to analyze the formation of Solar system analogues (SSAs) from the gaseous to the post-gas phase, in a self-consistently way. In the first paper (PI) we presented our model of planet…
The existence of planets born in environments highly perturbed by a stellar companion represents a major challenge to the paradigm of planet formation. In numerical simulations, the presence of a close binary companion stirs up the relative…
The high rate of planet detection among solar-type stars argues that planet formation is common. It is also generally assumed that planets form in protoplanetary discs like those observed in nearby star forming regions. On what timescale…
The understanding of the formation and evolution of the solar system still has many unanswered questions. Formation of solids in the solar system, mineral and organic mixing, and planetary body creation are all topics of interest to the…
Submillimeter observations with ALMA will be the essential next step in our understanding of how stars and planets form. Key projects range from detailed imaging of the collapse of pre-stellar cores and measuring the accretion rate of…
Observations have revealed rich structures in protoplanetary disks, offering clues about their embedded planets. Due to the complexities introduced by the abundance of gas in these disks, modeling their structure in detail is…
We report our current SMA and ALMA studies of disk and planet formation around protostars. We have revealed that $r \gtrsim$100 AU scale disks in Keplerian rotation are ubiquitous around Class I sources. These Class I Keplerian disks are…
The rapid advances in observations of the different populations of exoplanets, the characterization of their host stars and the links to the properties of their planetary systems, the detailed studies of protoplanetary disks, and the…
Circumstellar discs are expected to be the nursery of planets. Grain growth within such discs is the first step in the planet formation process in the core-accretion gas-capture scenario. We aim at providing selected criteria on…
How do planets form from circumstellar disks of gas and dust? What physical processes are responsible for determining the final masses of forming stars and ultimately the initial mass function (IMF)? The Hubble Space Telescope has made…
We review the progresses made in global theoretical models of planetary system formation in the last decade using the example of the planetary system formation framework known as the Bern Model that has been continuously developed since…
The compact multi-transiting planet systems discovered by Kepler challenge planet formation theories. Formation in situ from disks with radial mass surface density, $\Sigma$, profiles similar to the minimum mass solar nebula (MMSN) but…
Half of the energy ever emitted by stars and accreting objects comes to us in the FIR waveband and has yet to be properly explored. We propose a powerful Far-InfraRed Interferometer mission, FIRI, to carry out high-resolution imaging…
We carry out global three-dimensional radiation hydrodynamical simulations of self-gravitating accretion discs to determine if, and under what conditions, a disc may fragment to form giant planets. We explore the parameter space (in terms…