Related papers: Toward an initial mass function for giant planets
Gravitational interactions in star-forming regions are capable of disrupting and destroying planetary systems, as well as creating new ones. In particular, a planet can be stolen, where it is directly exchanged between passing stars during…
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…
The discovery of planetary systems beyond our solar system has challenged established theories of planetary formation. Planetary orbits display a variety of unexpected architectures, and free-floating planets appear ubiquitous. The recent…
Exoplanet surveys have revealed a wide diversity of planetary systems, requiring integrated models of planet formation to explain their origin. Planet population synthesis (PPS) modelling is a key tool for linking theory with the…
The rapid growth in the number of known exoplanets has revealed the existence of several distinct planetary populations in the observed mass-period diagram. Two of the most surprising are, (1) the concentration of gas giants around 1AU and…
The search for satellites around exoplanets represents one of the greatest challenges in advancing the characterization of planetary systems. Currently, we can only detect massive satellites, which resemble additional planetary companions…
Planets are born from disks of gas and dust, and observations of protoplanetary disks are used to constrain the initial conditions of planet formation. However, dust mass measurements of Class II disks with ALMA have called into question…
The mass and distribution of metals in the interiors of exoplanets are essential for constraining their formation and evolution processes. Nevertheless, with only masses and radii measured, the determination of exoplanet interior structures…
The chance that a planetary system will interact with another member of its host star's nascent cluster would be greatly increased if gas giant planets form in situ on wide orbits. In this paper, we explore the outcomes of planet-planet…
With n-body simulations, we model terrestrial circumbinary planet (CBP) formation with an initial surface density profile motivated by hydrodynamic circumbinary gas disc simulations. The binary plays an important role in shaping the initial…
In this paper we aim to simulate realistic exoplanet populations across different regions of the MW by combining state-of-the-art cosmological simulations of our Galaxy with exoplanet formation models and observations. We model the…
We investigate the possible commensurabilities to be expected when two protoplanets in the Jovian mass range, gravitationally interacting with each other and an external protoplanetary disc, are driven by disc induced orbital migration of…
The questions of how planets form and how common Earth-like planets are can be addressed by measuring the distribution of exoplanet masses and orbital periods. We report the occurrence rate of close-in planets (with orbital periods less…
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 examine the effects that planetary encounters have on the moon systems of ejected gas giant planets. We conduct a suite of numerical simulations of planetary systems containing three Jupiter-mass planets (with the innermost planet at 3…
For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…
We present numerical simulations of terrestrial planet formation that examine the growth continuously from planetesimals to planets in the inner Solar System. Previous studies show that the growth will be inside-out, but it is still common…
The distribution of angular momentum of planets and their host stars provides important information on the formation and evolution of the planetary system. However, mysteries still remain, partly due to bias and uncertainty of the current…
We suggest that the observed break in giant-planet frequency as a function of host metallicity at Z=0.02 may be a reflection of bimodal planet formation. We search for signatures of this bimodality in the distributions of the planet…
The majority of binary star systems that host exoplanets will spend the first portion of their lives within a star-forming cluster that may drive dynamical evolution of the binary-planet system. We perform numerical simulations of S-type…