Related papers: Protoplanetary Disk Science Enabled by Extremely L…

Planet formation remains a fundamentally important yet poorly understood process. Protoplanetary disks, the birthplaces of planetary systems, exhibit a wide range of substructures that are increasingly interpreted as signatures of…

The detection and characterization of protoplanets in protoplanetary disks around young stars is emerging as a transformative field that will redefine our understanding of how planetary systems form. While current facilities have revealed…

We have now accumulated a wealth of observations of the planet-formation environment and of mature planetary systems. These data allow us to test and refine theories of gas-giant planet formation by placing constraints on the conditions and…

The study of extrasolar planets has rapidly expanded to encompass the search for new planets, measurements of sizes and masses, models of planetary interiors, planetary demographics and occurrence frequencies, the characterization of…

Gas giants are the most readily detectable exoplanets but fundamental questions about their system architectures, formation, migration, and atmospheres have been unanswerable with the current generation of ground- and space-based…

Transmission and eclipse spectroscopy have been invaluable tools for the characterisation of extrasolar planet atmospheres. While they will continue to provide many new insights and discoveries in the decade(s) to come, these methods are…

Circumstellar disks are the sites of planet formation, and the very high incidence of extrasolar planets implies that most of them actually form planetary systems. Studying the structure and evolution of protoplanetary disks can thus place…

During their formation and early evolution, rocky planets undergo multiple global melting events due to accretionary collisions with other protoplanets. The detection and characterization of their post-collision afterglows (magma oceans)…

Within ten years, the era of large-scale systematics surveys will decay thanks to a complete census of exoplanetary systems within 200 pc from the Sun. With the first Lights foreseen between 2024 and 2028, the new generation of extremely…

Microlensing offers a unique opportunity to probe exoplanets that are temperate and beyond the snow line, as small as Jovian satellites, at extragalactic distance, and even free floating exoplanets, regimes where the sensitivity of other…

Planet formation is a hugely dynamic process requiring the transport, concentration and assimilation of gas and dust to form the first planetesimals and cores. With access to extremely high spatial and spectral resolution observations at…

In the past decade the study of exoplanet atmospheres at high-spectral resolution, via transmission/emission spectroscopy and cross-correlation techniques for atomic/molecular mapping, has become a powerful and consolidated methodology. The…

The advent of Extremely Large Telescopes ELTs, ground-based optical or infrared observatories with primary mirrors exceeding 20 m heralds a transformative epoch in observational astronomy. This article examines the dawn of this new era and…

Context: A full understanding of the planet and moon formation process requires observations that probe the circumplanetary environment of accreting giant planets. The mid-infrared ELT imager and spectrograph (METIS) will provide a unique…

The proposed US Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) Program would secure national open access to at least 25% of the observing time on the Thirty Meter Telescope in the north and the Giant Magellan Telescope in the south. ELTs would advance…

Few scientific discoveries have captured the public imagination like the explosion of exoplanetary science during the past two decades. This work has fundamentally changed our picture of Earth's place in the Universe and led NASA to make…

Protoplanetary disks are quasi-steady structures whose evolution and dispersal determine the environment for planet formation. I review the theory of protoplanetary disk evolution and its connection to observations. Substantial progress has…

When and how planets form in protoplanetary disks is still a topic of discussion. Exoplanet detection surveys and protoplanetary disk surveys are now providing results that allow us to have new insights. We collect the masses of confirmed…

The characterization of exoplanets and their birth protoplanetary disks has enormously advanced in the last decade. Benefitting from that, our global understanding of the planet formation processes has been substantially improved. In this…

Exoplanet science is booming. In 20 years our knowledge has expanded considerably, from the first discovery of a Hot Jupiter, to the detection of a large population of Neptunes and super-Earths, to the first steps toward the…