Related papers: The fragility of planetary systems
We study the internal response of a galaxy to an unbound encounter and present a survey of orbital parameters covering typical encounters in different galactic environments. Overall, we conclude that relatively weak encounters by low-mass…
It is likely that multiple bodies with masses between those of Mars and Earth ("planetary embryos") formed in the outer planetesimal disk of the solar system. Some of these were likely scattered by the giant planets into orbits with…
Planet Planet scattering is a leading dynamical mechanism invoked to explain the present orbital distribution of exoplanets. Many stars belong to binary systems, therefore it is important to understand how this mechanism works in presence…
Two fundamentally different processes of rocky planet formation exist, but it is unclear which one built the terrestrial planets of the solar system. Either they formed by collisions among planetary embryos from the inner solar system, or…
As gas giant planets evolve, they may scatter other planets far from their original orbits to produce hot Jupiters or rogue planets that are not gravitationally bound to any star. Here, we consider planets cast out to large orbital…
We used a sample of Kepler candidate planets with orbital periods less than 200 days and radii between 1.5 and 30 Earth radii to determine the typical dynamical spacing of neighboring planets. To derive the intrinsic (i.e., free of…
The dominant mechanism for generating free-floating planets has so far remained elusive. One suggested mechanism is that planets are ejected from planetary systems due to planet-planet interactions. However, instability around a single star…
Observations and cosmological simulations indicate that the early Universe hosted numerous compact, high-density stellar systems, where close encounters and physical collisions between stars were likely common. We develop a bottom-up…
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…
In planetary systems with sufficiently small inter-planet spacing, close encounters can lead to planetary collisions/mergers or ejections. We study the spin property of the merger products of two giant planets in a statistical manner using…
We numerically investigate the possibility of planetesimal accretion in circumbinary disks, under the coupled influence of both stars' secular perturbations and friction due to the gaseous component of the protoplanetary disk. We focus on…
The central regions of galaxies show the presence of massive black holes and/or dense stellar systems. The question about their modes of formation is still under debate. A likely explanation of the formation of the central dense stellar…
Most stars, binaries, and higher multiplicity systems are thought to form in stellar clusters and associations, which later dissociate. Very wide binaries can be easily disrupted in clusters due to dynamical evaporation (soft binaries)…
Clusters are the dense inner regions of a wide-spread hierarchy of young stellar structures. They often reveal a continuation of this hierarchy inside of them, to smaller scales, when they are young, but orbital mixing eventually erases…
Star clusters are often used as tracers of major star formation events in external galaxies as they can be studied up to much larger distances than individual stars. It is vital to understand their evolution if they are used to derive, for…
The dynamical architecture and compositional diversity of the asteroid belt strongly constrain planet formation models. Recent Solar System formation models have shown that the asteroid belt may have been born empty and later filled with…
The dynamical interactions of planetary systems may be a clue to their formation histories. Therefore, the distribution of these interactions provides important constraints on models of planet formation. We focus on each system's apsidal…
We model the early stages of planet formation in the Solar System, including continual planetesimal formation, and planetesimal and pebble accretion onto planetary embryos in an evolving disk driven by a disk wind. The aim is to constrain…
The existence of giant planets on wide orbits ($\stackrel{>}{_\sim}100$AU) challenge planet formation theories; the core accretion scenario has difficulty in forming them, whereas the disc instability model forms an overabundance of them…
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…