Related papers: Ploonets: formation, evolution and detectability o…
The formation of gas giant planets must occur during the first few Myr of a star's lifetime, when the protoplanetary disc still contains sufficient gas to be accreted onto the planetary core. The majority of protoplanetary discs are exposed…
The discovery of now about 20 extrasolar planets orbiting solar-type stars with properties quite different from those in our Solar System has raised many questions about the formation and evolution of planets. The tidal interaction between…
The newly formed giant planets may have migrated and crossed a number of mutual mean motion resonances (MMRs) when smaller objects (embryos) were accreting to form the terrestrial planets. We investigated the effects of the…
Theories of the formation and early evolution of planetary systems postulate that planets are born in circumstellar disks, and undergo radial migration during and after dissipation of the dust and gas disk from which they formed. The…
Detecting massive satellites of extrasolar planets has now become feasible, which led naturally to questions about their habitability. In a previous study we presented constraints on the habitability of moons from stellar and planetary…
Gravitational torques between a planet and gas in the protoplanetary disk result in orbital migration of the planet, and are likely to play an important role in the formation and early evolution of planetary systems. For masses comparable…
Stars formed in clusters can encounter other stars at close distances. In typical open clusters in the Solar neighbourhood containing hundreds or thousands of member stars, ten to twenty per cent of Solar-mass member stars are expected to…
The primary aim of this work is to examine the effect of parabolic stellar encounters on the evolution of a Jovian-mass giant planet forming within a protoplanetary disc. We consider the effect on both the mass accretion and the migration…
Context. The extremely low density of several long-period exoplanets in mature systems is still unexplained -- with HIP 41378 f being archetypical of this category. It has been proposed that such planets could actually have normal densities…
It is thought that, sometime after their formation, the solar system's giant planets experienced a dynamical instability that caused their orbits to excite, diverge, and ejected one or more objects with masses comparable to the ice giants.…
We use numerical integrations to investigate the dynamical evolution of resonant Trojan and quasi-satellite companions during the late stages of migration of the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Our migration simulations…
Planetary systems can evolve dynamically even after the planets themselves have fully formed, and there is circumstantial evidence that most planetary systems become unstable after the disappearance of the gaseous protoplanetary disk.…
Studies of planet migration derived from disc planet interactions began before the discovery of exoplanets. The potential importance of migration for determining orbital architectures being realised, the field received greater attention…
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…
Terrestrial planets are thought to be the result of a vast number of gravitational interactions and collisions between smaller bodies. We use numerical simulations to show that practically identical initial conditions result in a wide array…
The lower limit to the distribution of orbital periods P for the current population of close-in exoplanets shows a distinctive discontinuity located at approximately one Jovian mass. Most smaller planets have orbital periods longer than…
In principle, the combined measurements of the mass and radius a giant exoplanet allow one to determine the relative fraction of hydrogen and helium and of heavy elements in the planet. However, uncertainties on the underlying physics imply…
Forming the Moon by a high-angular momentum impact may explain the Earth-Moon isotopic similarities, however, the post-impact angular momentum needs to be reduced by a factor of 2 or more to the current value (1 L_EM) after the Moon forms.…
We present a mechanism related to the migration of giant protoplanets embedded in a protoplanetary disc whereby a giant protoplanet is caught up, before having migrated all the way to the central star, by a lighter outer giant protoplanet.…
Abridged: The discovery of "hot Jupiters" very close to their parent stars confirmed that Jovian planets migrate inward via several potential mechanisms. We present empirical constraints on planet migration halting mechanisms. We compute…