Related papers: Linking the formation and fate of exo-Kuiper belts…
The orbital architecture of the Solar System is thought to have been sculpted by a dynamical instability among the giant planets. During the instability a primordial outer disk of planetesimals was destabilized and ended up on…
The observation that the orbits of long-period Kuiper Belt objects are anomalously clustered in physical space has recently prompted the Planet Nine hypothesis - the proposed existence of a distant and eccentric planetary member of our…
Most stars form in dense stellar environments, where frequent close encounters can strongly perturb and reshape the early architecture of planetary systems. The solar system, with its rich population of distant comets, provides a natural…
We study the final architecture of planetary systems that evolve under the combined effects of planet-planet and planetesimal scattering. Using N-body simulations we investigate the dynamics of marginally unstable systems of gas and ice…
Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…
The Kepler mission has discovered about a dozen circumbinary planetary systems, all containing planets on ~ 1 AU orbits. We place bounds on the locations in the circumbinary protoplanetary disk, where these planets could have formed through…
Recent studies of solar system formation suggest that the solar system's giant planets formed and migrated in the protoplanetary disk to reach resonant orbits with all planets inside 15 AU from the Sun. After the gas disk's dispersal,…
The orbital parameters of the observed extrasolar planets differ strongly from those of our own solar system. The differences include planets with high masses, small semi-major axis and large eccentricities. We performed numerical…
Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) are remnants of a collisionally and dynamically evolved planetesimal disk in the outer solar system. This complex structure, known as the trans-Neptunian belt (or Edgeworth-Kuiper belt), can reveal important…
Despite the discovery of thousands of exoplanets in recent years, the number of known exoplanets in star clusters remains tiny. This may be a consequence of close stellar encounters perturbing the dynamical evolution of planetary systems in…
The existence of the Oort Comet Cloud, the Kuiper Belt, and plausible inefficiencies in planetary core formation, all suggest that there was once a residual planetesimal disk of mass 10-100 Earth-masses in the vicinity of the giant planets…
Among the extrasolar planetary systems about 30 are located in a stellar binary orbiting one of the stars, preferably the more massive primary. The dynamical influence of the second companion alters firstly the orbital elements of the…
Suggestions have been made that asteroid belts may be important both for the existence of life and perhaps even for the evolution of complex life on a planet. Using numerical models for protoplanetary discs we calculate the location of the…
Inward migration of giant planets is predicted by hydrodynamical simulations during the gas phase of the protoplanetary disc. The phenomenon is also invoked to explain resonant and near-resonant exoplanetary system structures. The early…
Fragmentation and fission of giant molecular clouds occasionally results in a pair of gravitationally bound star clusters that orbit their mutual centre of mass for some time, under the influence of internal and external perturbations. We…
The asteroid belt is the leftover of the original planetesimal population in the inner solar system. However, currently the asteroids have orbits with all possible values of eccentricities and inclinations compatible with long-term…
The recent years have witnessed a carnival of discoveries in the Outer Solar System. Here we provide evidence from numerical simulations of orbital stability to suggest the possible existence of two long lived belts of primordial…
Polluted white dwarfs are generally accreting terrestrial-like material that may originate from a debris belt like the asteroid belt in the solar system. The fraction of white dwarfs that are polluted drops off significantly for white…
The widely-separated, near-equal mass binaries hosted by the cold Classical Kuiper Belt are delicately bound and subject to disruption by many perturbing processes. We use analytical arguments and numerical simulations to determine their…
Many debris discs reveal a two-component structure, with an outer Kuiper-belt analogue and a warm inner component whose origin is still a matter of debate. One possibility is that warm emission stems from an "asteroid belt" closer in to the…