Related papers: The unseen planets of double belt debris disk syst…

We show that Earth mass planets orbiting stars in the Galactic disk and bulge can be detected by monitoring microlensed stars in the Galactic bulge. The star and its planet act as a binary lens which generates a lightcurve which can differ…

We investigate the formation of planetesimals via the gravitational instability of solids that have settled to the midplane of a circumstellar disk. Vertical shear between the gas and a subdisk of solids induces turbulent mixing which…

We examine the formation of planets around binary stars in light of the recently discovered systems Kepler 16, 34 and 35. We conduct hydrodynamical simulations of self gravitating disks around binary systems. The selected binary and disk…

The dust measured in debris disks traces the position of planetesimal belts. In our Solar System, we are also able to measure the largest planetesimals directly and can extrapolate down to make an estimate of the dust. The zodiacal dust…

We investigate the formation of dust gaps in circumstellar disks driven by the presence of multiple low-mass planets, focusing on the distinct physical mechanisms that operate across different gas-dust coupling regimes. We performed 2D…

As part of a national scientific network 'Pathways to Habitability' the formation of planets and the delivery of water onto these planets is a key question as water is essential for the development of life. In the first part of the paper we…

The recent detection of planets around very low mass stars raises the question of the formation, composition and potential habitability of these objects. We use planetary system formation models to infer the properties, in particular their…

We ask if Earth-like planets (terrestrial mass and habitable-zone orbit) can be detected in multi-planet systems, using astrometric and radial velocity observations. We report here the preliminary results of double-blind calculations…

The observed dust rings and gaps in protoplanetary disks could be imprints of forming planets. Even low-mass planets in the one-to-ten Earth-mass regime, that do not yet carve deep gas gaps, can generate such dust rings and gaps by driving…

In the past decades several thousand exoplanet systems have been discovered around evolved, main-sequence stars, revealing a wide diversity in their architectures. To understand how the planet formation process can lead to vastly different…

The first indication of the presence of a circumstellar debris disk is usually the detection of excess infrared emission from the population of small dust grains orbiting the star. This dust is short-lived, requiring continual…

A large sample of planet-planet scattering events for three planet systems with different orbital separations and masses is analyzed with a multiple regression model. The dependence of the time for the onset of instability on the masses of…

We study the dynamics of gas and dust in a protoplanetary disk in the presence of embedded planets. We investigate the conditions for dust-gap formation in terms of particle size and planetary mass. We also monitor the amount of dust that…

A handful of stars are known to host both an inner system of multiple transiting planets and an outer giant planet. These systems all feature a prominent gap between the orbits of two of the transiting planets, distinguishing them from…

Gap formation in a gas disk triggered by disk-planet tidal interaction is considered. Density waves launched by the planet are assumed to be damped as a result of their nonlinear evolution leading to shock formation and its subsequent…

We present results from a suite of N-body simulations that follow the accretion history of the terrestrial planets using a new parallel treecode that we have developed. We initially place 2000 equal size planetesimals between 0.5--4.0 AU…

Submillimeter and near-infrared images of cool dusty debris disks and rings suggest the existence of unseen planets. At dusty but non-imaged stars, semi-major axes of associated planets can be estimated from the dust temperature. For some…

Motivated by the reported dearth of debris discs around M stars, we use survival models to study the occurrence of planetesimal discs around them. These survival models describe a planetesimal disc with a small number of parameters,…

Debris disks, which are optically thin, dusty disks around main sequence stars, are often found to have structures and/or asymmetries associated with planet-disk interactions. Debris disk morphologies can hence be used as probes for planets…

We examine the predictions of the core accretion - gas capture model concerning the efficiency of planet formation around stars with various masses. First, we follow the evolution of gas and solids from the moment when all solids are in the…