Related papers: Asteroids and Comets
The characterization of exoplanets and their birth protoplanetary disks has enormously advanced in the last decade. Benefitting from that, our global understanding of the planet formation processes has been substantially improved. In this…
Newly formed stars are often observed to possess circumstellar disks, from which mass continues to be accreted onto the star and fed into outflowing jets, and which eventually may evolve into dusty debris disks and planetary systems. Recent…
The formation of planets is one of the major unsolved problems in modern astrophysics. Planets are believed to form out of the material in circumstellar disks known to exist around young stars, and which are a by-product of the star…
Circumstellar disks are an integral part of the star formation process and the sites where planets are formed. Understanding the physical processes that drive their evolution, as disks evolve from optically thick to optically thin, is…
Flattened, rotating disks of cool dust and gas extending for tens to hundreds of AU are found around almost all low mass stars shortly after their birth. These disks generally persist for several Myr, during which time some material…
The standard model for planet formation is a bottom-up process in which the origin of rocky and gaseous planets can be traced back to the collision of micron-sized dust grains within the gas-rich environment of protoplanetary disks. Key…
Meteorites are a remarkable resource. They capture the imagination of people worldwide with their spectacular entry through Earth's atmosphere as fireballs, and their exotic character of being pieces of other worlds. Scientifically, they…
The asteroid belt was dynamically shaped during and after planet formation. Despite representing a broad ring of stable orbits, the belt contains less than one one-thousandth of an Earth mass. The asteroid orbits are dynamically excited…
Advances in the discovery and characterization of asteroids over the past decade have revealed an unanticipated underlying structure that points to a dramatic early history of the inner Solar System. The asteroids in the main asteroid belt…
The dominant accretion process leading to the formation of the terrestrial planets of the Solar System is a subject of intense scientific debate. Two radically different scenarios have been proposed. The classic scenario starts from a disk…
In this chapter, we review the processes involved in the formation of planetesimals and comets. We will start with a description of the physics of dust grain growth and how this is mediated by gas-dust interactions in planet-forming disks.…
Planets form and obtain their compositions in disks of gas and dust around young stars. The chemical compositions of these planet-forming disks regulate all aspects of planetary compositions from bulk elemental inventories to access to…
The Solar System formed about 4.6 billion years ago from a condensation of matter inside a molecular cloud. Trying to reconstruct what happened is the goal of this chapter. For that, we put together our understanding of Galactic objects…
This paper reviews the dynamics of the growth of solid particles from micron-sized dust grains to planets in protostellar accretion disks. The formation and orbital evolution of giant protoplanets is also discussed.
Conditions in the protosolar nebula have left their mark in the composition of cometary volatiles, thought to be some of the most pristine material in the solar system. Cometary compositions represent the end point of processing that began…
Geochemical and astronomical evidence demonstrate that planet formation occurred in two spatially and temporally separated reservoirs. The origin of this dichotomy is unknown. We use numerical models to investigate how the evolution of the…
Over the past 10 years abundant evidence has emerged that many (if not all) stars are born with circumstellar disks. Understanding the evolution of post-accretion disks can provide strong constraints on theories of planet formation and…
Disk accretion may be the fundamental astrophysical process. Stars and planets form through the accretion of gas in a disk. Black holes and galaxies co-evolve through efficient disk accretion onto the central supermassive black hole.…
This chapter of the book Planetary Ring Systems addresses the origin of planetary rings, one of the least understood processes related to planet formation and evolution. Whereas rings seem ubiquitous around giant planets, their great…
Protoplanetary disks are the birthplaces of planetary systems. The evolution of the star-disk system and the disk chemical composition determines the initial conditions for planet formation. Therefore a comprehensive understanding of the…