Related papers: Twisted debris: how differential secular perturbat…
We discuss the physics of vortices in the circumstellar disks associated with young stellar objects. We elucidate the basic physical properties of these localized storm systems. In particular, we consider point vortices, linear vortices,…
Young massive stars influence their surroundings from local to galactic scales, but the observational challenges associated with their distance and embedded nature has, until the recent decade, made high-resolution studies of these objects…
Extensive photometric stellar surveys show that many main sequence stars show emission at infrared and longer wavelengths that is in excess of the stellar photosphere; this emission is thought to arise from circumstellar dust. The presence…
Protoplanetary disks are gaseous systems in Keplerian rotation around young stars, known to be turbulent. They include a small fraction of dust from which planets form. In the incremental scenario for planet growth, the formation of…
Planet formation models rely on knowledge of the physical conditions and evolutionary processes in protoplanetary disks, in particular the grain size distribution and dust growth timescales. In theoretical models, several barriers exist…
Transitional disks are objects whose inner disk regions have undergone substantial clearing. The Spitzer Space Telescope produced detailed spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of transitional disks that allowed us to infer their radial dust…
Combining hydrodynamic planet-disk interaction simulations with dust evolution models, we show that protoplanetary disks having a giant planet can reveal diverse morphology in (sub-)millimeter continuum, including a full disk without…
The dynamics of planetesimals and planetary cores may be strongly influenced by density perturbations driven by magneto-rotational turbulence in their natal protoplanetary gas disks. Using the local shearing box approximation, we perform…
Circumbinary gas disks are often observed to be misaligned to the binary orbit suggesting that planet formation may proceed in a misaligned disk. With N-body simulations we consider the formation of circumbinary terrestrial planets from a…
We study orbital inclination changes associated with the precession of a disc-planet system that occurs through gravitational interaction with a binary companion on an inclined orbit. We investigate whether this scenario can account for…
Self-gravitating protostellar discs are unstable to fragmentation if the gas can cool on a time scale that is short compared to the orbital period. We use a combination of hydrodynamic simulations and N-body orbit integrations to study the…
It is difficult to imagine a planet formation model that does not at some stage include a gravitationally unstable disc. Initially unstable gas-dust discs may form planets directly, but the high surface density required has motivated the…
Recent observations of protoplanetary discs reveal disc substructures potentially caused by embedded planets. We investigate how the gas surface density in discs changes the observed morphology in scattered light and dust continuum…
We study particle dynamics in local two-dimensional simulations of self-gravitating accretion discs with a simple cooling law. It is well known that the structure which arises in the gaseous component of the disc due to a gravitational…
Dissimilarities in the spatial distribution of small (micron-size) and large (millimeter-size) dust grains at the cavity edge of transition disks have been recently pointed out and are now under debate. We obtained VLT-NACO near-IR…
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…
Protoplanetary disks are the sites of planet formation, and the evolution and eventual dispersal of these disks strongly influences the formation of planetary systems. Disk evolution during the planet-forming epoch is driven by accretion…
We present a comprehensive series of $N$-body as well as $N$-body + SPH simulations to study the secular evolution of the structure of disk galaxies. Our simulations are organized in a hierarchy of increasing complexity, ranging from…
Galaxy disks evolve through angular momentum transfers between sub-components, like gas, stars, or dark matter halos, through non axi-symmetric instabilities. The speed of this evolution is boosted in presence of a large fraction of cold…
Most of the visible mass in a typical spiral galaxy is distributed in a thin disk, with a radial extent much larger than its thickness. While the planar disk structure, including non-axisymmetric features such as spiral structure, has been…