Related papers: Uranus and Neptune: Origin, Evolution and Internal…
Neptune remains a mysterious world that deserves further exploration and is a high-priority objective for a future planetary mission in order to better understand the formation and evolution of ice giant planets. We have developed a coupled…
Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…
The mid-infrared spectral region provides a unique window into the atmospheric temperature, chemistry, and dynamics of the giant planets. From more than a century of mid-infrared remote sensing, progressively clearer pictures of the…
Exoplanetary science continues to excite and surprise with its rich diversity. We discuss here some key aspects potentially influencing the range of exoplanetary terrestrial-type atmospheres which could exist in nature. We are motivated by…
This article relates two topics of central importance in modern astronomy - the discovery some fifteen years ago of the first planets around other stars (exoplanets), and the centuries-old problem of understanding the origin of our own…
Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) are icy/rocky bodies that move beyond the orbit of Neptune in a region known as the trans-Neptunian belt (or Edgeworth-Kuiper belt). In contrast to the predictions of accretion models that feature…
Our understanding of the processes that are relevant to the formation and maintenance of habitable planetary systems is advancing at a rapid pace, both from observation and theory. The present review focuses on recent research that bears on…
In the Nice model of solar system formation, Uranus and Neptune undergo an orbital upheaval, sweeping through a planetesimal disk. The region of the disk from which material is accreted by the ice giants during this phase of their evolution…
Many exoplanets have orbital characteristics quite different from those seen in our own solar system, including planets locked in orbital resonances and planets on orbits that are elliptical or highly inclined from their host star's spin…
In the coming years, it is likely that the first potentially Earth-like planets will be discovered orbiting other stars. Once found, the characterisation of those planets will play a vital role in determining which will be chosen as the…
Deep elemental composition is a challenging measurement to achieve in the giant planets of the solar system. Yet, knowledge of the deep composition offers important insights in the internal structure of these planets, their evolutionary…
Modeling the interior of a planet is difficult because the small number of measured parameters is insufficient to constrain the many variables involved in describing the interior structure and composition. One solution is to invoke…
In the Solar system the planets' compositions vary with orbital distance, with rocky planets in close orbits and lower-density gas giants in wider orbits. The detection of close-in giant planets around other stars was the first clue that…
While there has been significant progress in our understanding of the origin and evolu-tion of planetary nebulae in the last 50 years, there remain several unsolved problems. These include the true 3D morphological structure of the nebulae,…
Thermal evolution models suggest that the luminosities of both Uranus and Neptune are inconsistent with the classical assumption of an adiabatic interior. Such models commonly predict Uranus to be brighter and, recently, Neptune to be…
The interior composition and structure of Uranus are ambiguous. It is unclear whether Uranus is composed of fully differentiated layers dominated by an icy mantle or has smooth compositional gradients. The Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP),…
The origin of close-in giant planets is a key open question in planet formation theory. The two leading models are (i) formation at the outer disk followed by migration and (ii) in situ formation. In this work we determine the atmospheric…
The formation of planets is one of the major unsolved problems in modern astrophysics. Planets are believed to form out of the material in circumstellar disks known to exist around young stars, and which are a by-product of the star…
Evidence suggests the existence of a large planet in the outer Solar System, Planet Nine, with a predicted mass of 6.6 +2.6 / -1.7 Earth masses (Brown et al., 2024). Based on mass radius composition models, planet formation theory, and…
Most our knowledge about rocky exoplanets is based on their measure of mass and radius. These two parameters are routinely measured and are used to categorise different populations of observed exoplanets. They are also tightly linked to the…