Related papers: Sculpting eccentric debris disks with eccentric ga…
Resolved images suggest that asymmetric structures are a common feature of cold debris disks. While planets close to these disks are rarely detected, their hidden presence and gravitational perturbations provide plausible explanations for…
Gas and dust in inclined orbits around binaries experience precession induced by the binary gravitational torque. The difference in precession between gas and dust alters the radial drift of weakly coupled dust and leads to density…
The statistics of discovered exoplanets suggest that planets form efficiently. However, there are fundamental unsolved problems, such as excessive inward drift of particles in protoplanetary disks during planet formation. Recent theories…
Exoplanets on eccentric orbits experience an incident stellar flux that can be markedly larger at periastron versus apoastron. This variation in instellation can lead to dramatic changes in atmospheric structure in regions of the atmosphere…
While detecting low mass exoplanets at tens of au is beyond current instrumentation, debris discs provide a unique opportunity to study the outer regions of planetary systems. Here we report new ALMA observations of the 80-200 Myr old Solar…
Debris disks are optically thin, almost gas-free dusty disks observed around a significant fraction of main-sequence stars older than about 10 Myr. Since the circumstellar dust is short-lived, the very existence of these disks is considered…
The Sun and >15 percent of nearby stars are surrounded by dusty debris disks that must be collisionally replenished by asteroids and comets, as the dust would otherwise be depleted on <10 Myr timescales (ref. 1). Theoretical studies show…
Planet-forming discs in sufficiently strong UV environments lose gas in external photoevaporative winds. Dust can also be entrained within these winds, which has consequences for the possible solids reservoir for planet formation, and…
Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the alignment of grains with the interstellar magnetic field, including paramagnetic dissipation, radiative torques, and supersonic gas-grain streaming. These must compete with disaligning…
We find that, under certain conditions, protoplanetary disks may spontaneously generate multiple, concentric gas rings without an embedded planet through an eccentric cooling instability. Using both linear theory and non-linear…
A significant fraction of main-sequence stars are encircled by dusty debris discs, where the short-lived dust particles are replenished through collisions between planetesimals. Most destructive collisions occur when the orbits of smaller…
Outflows of pre-main-sequence stars drive shocks into molecular material within 0.01 - 1 pc of the young stars. The shock-heated gas emits infrared, millimeter and submillimeter lines of many species including. Dust grains are important…
Narrow dust rings observed around some young stars (e.g., HR 4796A) need to be confined. We present a possible explanation for the formation and confinement of such rings in optically thin circumstellar disks, without invoking shepherding…
The planet candidate Fomalhaut b is bright in optical light but undetected in longer wavelengths, requiring a large, reflective dust cloud. The most recent observations find an extremely eccentric orbit (e ~ 0.8), indicating that Fomalhaut…
Intermediate-mass stars (1-3 Msun) host some of the brightest and best-studied debris discs. This stellar class is also the most frequent host of molecular gas in systems older than typical protoplanetary disc lifetimes, and the most likely…
The morphology of the epsilon Eridani dust ring is reproduced by a numerical simulation of dust particles captured into the 5:3 and 3:2 exterior mean-motion resonances with a 0.3 eccentricity 10^-4 solar mass planet at periastron at a…
We have applied a powerful numerical approach to compute, with a high resolution, the structure of dusty circumstellar disks with embedded planets. We emphasize some testable implications of our simulations which would verify the presence…
Predicting how a young planet shapes the gas and dust emission of its parent disc is key to constraining the presence of unseen planets in protoplanetary disc observations. We investigate the case of a 2 Jupiter mass planet that becomes…
ALMA has revealed that the millimetre dust structures of protoplanetary discs are extremely diverse. It has been proposed that the strength of H$_2$O emission in the inner disc particularly depends on the influx of icy pebbles from the…
We study the three-dimensional evolution of a viscous protoplanetary disc which accretes gas material from a second protoplanetary disc during a close encounter in an embedded star cluster. The aim is to investigate the capability of the…