Related papers: Jupiter's Decisive Role in the Inner Solar System'…
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…
Exoplanet surveys have confirmed one of humanity's (and all teenagers') worst fears: we are weird. If our Solar System were observed with present-day Earth technology -- to put our system and exoplanets on the same footing -- Jupiter is the…
Hot Jupiters, giant extrasolar planets with orbital periods shorter than ~10 days, have long been thought to form at large radial distances, only to subsequently experience long-range inward migration. Here, we propose that in contrast with…
The accretion ages of the first planetesimals-the parent bodies of magmatic iron meteorites-suggest they formed within the first 0.5-1 Myr of Solar System history. Yet, planetesimal formation appears to have occurred in at least two…
Our Solar system is almost entirely devoid of material interior to Mercury's orbit, in sharp contrast to the multiple Earth masses of material commonly residing within the analogous region of extrasolar planetary systems. Recent work has…
The dynamical structure of the Solar System can be explained by a period of orbital instability experienced by the giant planets. While a late instability was originally proposed to explain the Late Heavy Bombardment, recent work favors an…
Jupiter's core is generally assumed to have formed beyond the snow line. Here we consider an alternative scenario, that Jupiter's core may have accumulated in the innermost parts of the protoplanetary disk. A growing body of research…
The formation of the solar system's giant planets predated the ultimate epoch of massive impacts that concluded the process of terrestrial planet formation. Following their formation, the giant planets' orbits evolved through an episode of…
Planets of 1-4 times Earth's size on orbits shorter than 100 days exist around 30-50% of all Sun-like stars. In fact, the Solar System is particularly outstanding in its lack of "hot super-Earths" (or "mini-Neptunes"). These planets -- or…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing of the giant planets, can be explained if planets radially migrated by exchanging orbital energy and momentum with outer disk planetesimals. Neptune's…
Numerical simulations show that the migration of growing planetary cores may be dominated by turbulent fluctuations in the protoplanetary disk, rather than by any mean property of the flow. We quantify the impact of this stochastic core…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing and orbital eccentricities of giant planets, can be explained if the early Solar System evolved through a dynamical instability followed by migration of planets in…
The orbital parameters of the observed extrasolar planets differ strongly from those of our own solar system. The differences include planets with high masses, small semi-major axis and large eccentricities. We performed numerical…
Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…
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…
The migration history of Jupiter in the sun's natal disk remains poorly constrained. Here we consider how Jupiter's migration affects small-body reservoirs and how this constrains its original orbital distance from the Sun. We study the…
A planet orbiting in a disk of planetesimals can experience an instability in which it migrates to smaller orbital radii. Resonant interactions between the planet and planetesimals remove angular momentum from the planetesimals, increasing…
More than two decades after the widespread detection of Jovian-class planets on short-period orbits around other stars, their dynamical origins remain imperfectly understood. In the traditional narrative, these highly irradiated giant…
The standard model for giant planet formation is based on the accretion of solids by a growing planetary embryo, followed by rapid gas accretion once the planet exceeds a so-called critical mass. The dominant size of the accreted solids…
From wispy gas giants on the verge of disruption to tiny rocky bodies already falling apart, short-period exoplanets pose a severe puzzle to theories of planet formation and orbital evolution. By far most of the planets known beyond the…