Related papers: Migration-driven diversity of super-Earth composit…
We use an end-to-end model of planet formation, thermodynamic evolution, and atmospheric escape to investigate how the statistical imprints of evaporation depend on the bulk composition of planetary cores (rocky vs. icy). We find that the…
We discuss problems of planetesimal migration in the emerging Solar System and exoplanetary systems. Protoplanetary disk evolution models and the formation of planets are considered. The formation of the Moon and of the asteroid and…
A question driving many studies is whether the thousands of exoplanets known today typically formed where we observe them or formed further out in the disk and migrated in. Early discoveries of giant exoplanets orbiting near their host…
The discovery of close orbiting extrasolar giant planets led to extensive studies of disk planet interactions and the forms of migration that can result as a means of accounting for their location. Early work established the type I and type…
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…
We propose a pebble-driven planet formation scenario to form giant planets with high multiplicity and large orbital distances in the early gas disk phase. We perform N-body simulations to investigate the growth and migration of low-mass…
This work describes new dynamical simulations of terrestrial planet formation. The simulations started at the protoplanetary disk stage, when planetesimals formed and accreted into protoplanets, and continued past the late stage of giant…
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…
Over a hundred rocky planets orbiting Sun-like stars in very short orbital periods (<1 day) have been discovered by the Kepler mission. These planets, known as ultra-short-period (USP) planets, are unlikely to have attained their orbits in…
"Pebble snow" describes a planet formation mechanism where icy pebbles in the outer disk reach inner planet embryos as the water ice line evolves inward. We model the effects pebble snow has on sculpting planetary system architectures by…
Giant planet embryos are believed to be spawned by gravitational instability in massive extended (R ~ 100 AU) protostellar discs. In a recent paper we have shown that dust can sediment inside the embryos, as argued earlier by Boss (1998) in…
The characterization of Super-Earth-to-Neptune sized exoplanets relies heavily on our understanding of their formation and evolution. In this study, we link a model of planet formation by pebble accretion to the planets' long-term…
The theory of planet formation through pebble accretion (PA) has gained in popularity over the past decade. Most PA studies start with planetary embryos much larger than those expected from the streaming instability. In this study, we…
Mass-independent isotopic anomalies of carbonaceous and non-carbonaceous meteorites show a clear dichotomy suggesting an efficient separation of the inner and outer solar system. Observations show that ring-like structures in the…
A new piece of evidence supporting the photoevaporation-driven evolution model for low-mass, close-in exoplanets was recently presented by the California-Kepler-Survey. The radius distribution of the Kepler planets is shown to be bimodal,…
Most, if not all, sun-like stars host one or more planets, making multi-planetary systems commonplace in our galaxy. We utilize hundreds of multi-planet simulations to explore the origin of such systems, focusing on their orbital…
The NASA Kepler mission has revealed an abundant class of Systems with Tightly-packed Inner Planets (STIPs). The current paradigm for planet formation suggests that small planetesimals will quickly spiral into the host star due to…
The evolution of protoplanetary discs embedded in stellar clusters depends on the age and the stellar density in which they are embedded. Stellar clusters of young age and high stellar surface density destroy protoplanetary discs by…
Transiting circumbinary planets discovered by Kepler provide unique insight into binary star and planet formation. Several features of this new found population, for example the apparent pile-up of planets near the innermost stable orbit,…
Small planets, 1-4x the size of Earth, are extremely common around Sun-like stars, and surprisingly so, as they are missing in our solar system. Recent detections have yielded enough information about this class of exoplanets to begin…