Related papers: Twisted debris: how differential secular perturbat…
The debate over whether kilometer-sized solids, or planetesimals, assemble by collision-induced chemical sticking or by gravity-driven unstable modes remains unsettled. In light of recent work showing that gravitational growth can occur…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) has excelled in imaging debris disks in the near-infrared. The GPI Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) imaged twenty-four debris disks in polarized $H$-band light, while other programs observed half of these disks in…
Protoplanetary disks observed in scattered light reveal essential insights into the disk's three-dimensional architecture and dust properties. These disks, which play a crucial role in planet formation, have complex structures where the…
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…
We analyze two new sets of coagulation calculations for solid particles orbiting within the terrestrial zone of a solar-type star. In models of collisional cascades, numerical simulations demonstrate that the total mass, the mass in 1 mm…
The dust disks observed around mature stars are evidence that plantesimals are present in these systems on spatial scales that are similar to that of the asteroids and the KBOs in the Solar System. These dust disks (a.k.a. ``debris disks'')…
We review the models and results of simulations of self-gravitating, gaseous protoplanetary disks in binary star systems. These models have been calculated by three different groups with three different computational methods, two…
We consider the observational signatures of giant impacts between planetary embryos. While the debris released in the impact remains in a clump for only a single orbit, there is a much longer lasting asymmetry caused by the fact that all…
During close approaches to planets or stars, the morphological and dynamical properties of rubble-pile small bodies can be modified, and some may catastrophically break up. This phenomenon is of particular interest for understanding the…
Debris discs are dusty belts of planetesimals around main-sequence stars, similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our solar system. The planetesimals cannot be observed directly, yet they produce detectable dust in mutual collisions.…
The excess emission seen in spectral energy distributions (SEDs) is commonly used to infer the properties of the emitting circumstellar dust in protoplanetary and debris discs. Most notably, dust size distributions and details of the…
Standard models of planet formation explain how planets form in axisymmetric, unperturbed disks in single star systems. However, it is possible that giant planets could have already formed when other planetary embryos start to grow. We…
Using simple geometrical arguments, we paint an overview of the variety of resonant structures a single planet with moderate eccentricity (e < ~0.6) can create in a dynamically cold, optically thin dust disk. This overview may serve as a…
'Debris disks' are collections of small bodies around stars, such as the Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt in our Solar System. These disks are composed of objects smaller than planets, including asteroids, comets, dust, and dwarf planets. We…
Debris disks are dusty, gas-poor disks around main sequence stars (Backman & Paresce 1993; Lagrange, Backman & Artymowicz 2000; Zuckerman 2001). Micron-sized dust grains are inferred to exist in these systems from measurements of their…
Theoretical formation models and exoplanet detection surveys indicate that systems with multiple giant planets are common. We investigate how multiple super-thermal mass planets embedded in a circumstellar disk shape the dust distribution…
We carry out three dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to study the impact of planet-disc interactions on a gravitationally unstable protoplanetary disc. We find that the impact of a planet on the disc's evolution can be…
We present a new multi-annulus code for the study of collisionally evolving extended debris discs. We first aim to confirm results obtained for a single-annulus system, namely that the size distribution in "real" debris discs always departs…
How do galaxies move relative to one another? While we can examine the motion of dark matter subhalos around their hosts in simulations of structure formation, determining the orbits of satellites around their parent galaxies from…
In recent years, a number of eccentric debris belts have been observed in extrasolar systems. The most common explanation for their shape is the presence of a nearby eccentric planetary companion. The gravitational perturbation from such a…