Related papers: Planet formation: key mechanisms and global models

Recent exoplanet surveys revealed that for solar-type stars, close-in Super-Earths are ubiquitous and many of them are in multi-planet systems. These systems are more compact than the Solar System's terrestrial planets. However, there have…

Galaxy formation is at the heart of our understanding of cosmic evolution. Although there is a consensus that galaxies emerged from the expanding matter background by gravitational instability of primordial fluctuations, a number of…

Planetesimal formation stage represents a major gap in our understanding of the planet formation process. The late-stage planet accretion models typically make arbitrary assumptions about planetesimals and pebbles distribution while the…

One well-tested method in science is to separate the object of interest from its surroundings and look at it in isolation. The advantage is that unimportant information is removed and the true properties of the object are seen more clearly.…

In the standard model of core accretion, the formation of giant planets occurs by two main processes: first, a massive core is formed by the accretion of solid material; then, when this core exceeds a critical value (typically greater than…

With n-body simulations, we model terrestrial circumbinary planet (CBP) formation with an initial surface density profile motivated by hydrodynamic circumbinary gas disc simulations. The binary plays an important role in shaping the initial…

The transfer of circumstellar disk mass and momentum onto the protostar and out into the environment occurs via a variety of mechanisms including magnetospheric accretion, jets, outflows, and disk winds. The interplay of these processes…

For centuries, our knowledge of planetary systems and ideas about planet formation were based on a single example, our solar system. During the last thirteen years, the discovery of ~170 planetary systems has ushered in a new era for…

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.…

A new theoretical hypothesis on the origin and formation of the solar and extrasolar planetary systems is summarized and briefly discussed in the light of recent detections of extrasolar planets, and studies of shock wave interaction with…

Planets form in the circumstellar disks of young stars. We review the basic physical processes by which solid bodies accrete each other and alter each others' random velocities, and we provide order-of-magnitude derivations for the rates of…

Various problems of the formation and evolution of planetary systems are studied. Most of the studies are devoted to the Solar System. The collapse of the presolar cloud and the accumulation of planets are studied. The author considers the…

The great diversity of extrasolar planetary systems has challenged our understanding of how planets form, and how their orbits evolve as they form. Among the various processes that may account for this diversity, the gravitational…

Planet formation remains a fundamentally important yet poorly understood process. Protoplanetary disks, the birthplaces of planetary systems, exhibit a wide range of substructures that are increasingly interpreted as signatures of…

An unsolved issue in the standard core accretion model for gaseous planet formation is how kilometre-sized planetesimals form from, initially, micron-sized dust grains. Solid growth beyond metre sizes can be difficult both because the…

The extrasolar planets (EPs) so far detected are very different to the planets in our own Solar System. Many of them have Jupiter-like masses and close-in orbits (the so-called hot planets, HPs), with orbital periods of only a few days. In…

Star and planet formation are inextricably linked. In the earliest phases of the collapse of a protostar a disc forms around the young star and such discs are observed for the first several million years of a star's life. It is within these…

The solar system started to form about 4.56 Gyr ago and despite the long intervening time span, there still exist several clues about its formation. The three major sources for this information are meteorites, the present solar system…

To date, two planetary systems have been discovered with close-in, terrestrial-mass planets (< 5-10 Earth masses). Many more such discoveries are anticipated in the coming years with radial velocity and transit searches. Here we investigate…

For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…