Related papers: Conundrums and constraints concerning the formatio…
The early gas-dust solar nebula is considered: the gasdynamic theory is used to study the gravitational Jeans-type instability in its protoplanetary disk. The implications for the origin of the solar system are discussed. It is shown that a…
Exoplanet surveys have confirmed one of humanity's (and all teenagers') worst fears: we are weird. If our Solar System were observed with present-day Earth technology -- to put our system and exoplanets on the same footing -- Jupiter is the…
The outer giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, pose a challenge to theories of planet formation. They exist in a region of the Solar System where long dynamical timescales and a low primordial density of material would have conspired to make…
Observations indicate that the gaseous circumstellar disks around young stars vary significantly in size, ranging from tens to thousands of AU. Models of planet formation depend critically upon the properties of these primordial disks, yet…
The Trojan asteroids provide a unique perspective on the history of Solar System. As a large population of small bodies, they record important gravitational interactions and dynamical evolution of the Solar System. In the past decade,…
In this review, three major changes in our understanding of the early history of the Solar System are presented. 1) Early differentiation: A few recent results support the idea that protoplanet formation and differentiation occurred partly…
Solar evolutionary models are thus far unable to reproduce spectroscopic, helioseismic, and neutrino constraints consistently, resulting in the so-called solar modeling problem. In parallel, planet formation models predict that the evolving…
In the recent years, the "Nice" model of solar system formation has attained an unprecedented level of success in reproducing much of the observed orbital architecture of the solar system by evolving the planets to their current locations…
The formation of the solar system's giant planets predated the ultimate epoch of massive impacts that concluded the process of terrestrial planet formation. Following their formation, the giant planets' orbits evolved through an episode of…
An episode of dynamical instability is thought to have sculpted the orbital structure of the outer solar system. When modeling this instability, a key constraint comes from Jupiter's fifth eccentric mode (quantified by its amplitude M55),…
Aspects of our Solar System's formation are deduced from observations of the chemical nature of matter. Massive cores are indicative of terrestrial-planet-composition-similarity to enstatite chondrite meteorites, whose highly-reduced state…
The statistics of extrasolar planetary systems indicate that the default mode of planet formation generates planets with orbital periods shorter than 100 days, and masses substantially exceeding that of the Earth. When viewed in this…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing of the giant planets, can be explained if planets radially migrated by exchanging orbital energy and momentum with outer disk planetesimals. Neptune's…
The Capture Theory gives planet production through a tidal interaction between a condensed star and a diffuse protostar within a dense embedded cluster. Initial extensive and highly eccentric planetary orbits round-off and decay in a…
The initial conditions, physics, and outcome of planet formation are now constrained by detailed observations of protoplanetary disks, laboratory experiments, and the discovery of thousands of extrasolar planetary systems. These…
Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…
In view of the many recent observations conducted by ALMA and SPHERE, it is becoming clear that protoplanetary disks form planets in narrow annular gaps at various distances from the central protostars before these protostars are actually…
The solar system's dynamical state can be explained by an orbital instability among the giant planets. A recent model has proposed that the giant planet instability happened during terrestrial planet formation. This scenario has been shown…
The study of our Solar System -- its formation, evolution, and long-term stability -- has been ongoing for centuries and is now a standard part of scientific education. While the formation of other Solar-like exoplanetary systems is…
Outer satellites of the planets have distant, eccentric orbits that can be highly inclined or even retrograde relative to the equatorial planes of their planets. These irregular orbits cannot have formed by circumplanetary accretion and are…