Related papers: Why are Jupiter-family comets active and asteroids…
Planetary debris disks around other stars are analogous to the Asteroid and Kuiper belts in the Solar System. Their structure reveals the configuration of small bodies and provides hints for the presence of planets. The nearby star…
Photometry from the Helios and STEREO spacecraft revealed regions of enhanced sky surface-brightness suggesting a narrow circumsolar ring of dust associated with Venus's orbit. We model this phenomenon by integrating the orbits of…
The brightest transitional protoplanetary disks are often azimuthally asymmetric: their mm-wave thermal emission peaks strongly on one side. Dust overdensities can exceed $\sim$100:1, while gas densities vary by factors less than a few. We…
We address two outstanding issues in the sequential accretion scenario for gas giant planet formation, the retention of dust grains in the presence of gas drag and that of cores despite type I migration. The efficiency of these processes is…
Searching for the non-Trojan Jupiter co-orbitals we have numerically integrated orbits of 3\,160 asteroids and 24 comets discovered by October 2010 and situated within and close to the planet co-orbital region. Using this sample we have…
The planet-forming disk of HD 142527 is known for its azimuthally asymmetric dust trap, shadows, and spiral arms. We use new ALMA observations to investigate the molecular composition and to determine the ongoing chemical processes and the…
We examine the orbital element distribution of main-belt comets (MBCs), which are objects that exhibit cometary activity yet orbit in the main asteroid belt, and may be potentially useful as tracers of ice in the inner solar system. We find…
Upcoming studies of extrasolar gas giants will give precise insights into the composition of planetary atmospheres with the ultimate goal to link it to the formation history of the planet. Here, we investigate how drifting and evaporating…
There are strong observational indications that the dense slow winds of cool luminous AGB stars are driven by radiative pressure on dust grains which form in the extended atmospheres resulting from pulsation-induced shocks. For carbon…
Protoplanetary disks exhibit a rich variety of substructure in millimeter continuum emission, often attributed to unseen planets. As these planets carve gaps in the gas, dust particles can accumulate in the resulting pressure bumps, forming…
The majority of gas giants (planets of masses $\gtrsim10^2 M_\oplus$) are found to reside at distances beyond $\sim1$ au from their host stars. Within 1 au, the planetary population is dominated by super-Earths of $2-20 M_\oplus$. We show…
Context: Radius and mass measurements of short-period giant planets reveal that many of these planets contain a large amount of heavy elements, in sharp contrast with the expectations of the conventional core-accretion model for the origin…
Ablation of interplanetary dust supplies oxygen to the upper atmospheres of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Using recent dynamical model predictions for the dust influx rates to the giant planets (Poppe, A.R.~et al.~[2016], Icarus…
The Earth and other rocky bodies in the inner solar system contain significantly less carbon than the primordial materials that seeded their formation. These carbon-poor objects include the parent bodies of primitive meteorites, suggesting…
Starless dense cores eventually collapse dynamically, which forms protostars inside them, and the physical properties of the cores determine the nature of the forming protostars. We report ALMA observations of dust continuum emission and…
The young star beta Pictoris is well known for its dusty debris disk, produced through the grinding down by collisions of planetesimals, kilometre-sized bodies in orbit around the star. In addition to dust, small amounts of gas are also…
Transitional disks around young stars are promising candidates to look for recently formed, embedded planets. Planet-disk interaction models predict that planets clear a gap in the gas while trapping dust at larger radii. Other physical…
The short period Jupiter family comets (JFCs) are thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt; specifically, a dynamical subclass of the Kuiper Belt known as the `scattered disk' is argued to be the dominant source of JFCs. However, the best…
Planets embedded within dust disks may drive the formation of large scale clumpy dust structures by trapping dust into resonant orbits. Detection and subsequent modeling of the dust structures would help constrain the mass and orbit of the…
The formation of circumplanetary disks is central to our understanding of giant planet formation, influencing their growth rate during the post-runaway phase and observability while embedded in protoplanetary disks. We use 3D global…