Related papers: Linking the formation and fate of exo-Kuiper belts…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing of the giant planets, can be explained if planets radially migrated by exchanging orbital energy and momentum with outer disk planetesimals. Neptune's…
The binary star system gamma Cephei is unusual in that it harbours a stable giant planet around the larger star at a distance only about a tenth of that of the stellar separation. Numerical simulations are carried out into the stability of…
Exoplanets have been detected around stars at various stages of their lives, ranging from young stars emerging from formation, to latter stages of evolution, including white dwarfs and neutron stars. Post main sequence stellar evolution can…
The early gas-dust solar nebula is considered: the gasdynamic theory is used to study the gravitational Jeans-type instability in its protoplanetary disk. The implications for the origin of the solar system are discussed. It is shown that a…
The origin of the orbital structure of the cold component of the Kuiper belt is still a hot subject of investigation. Several features of the solar system suggest that the giant planets underwent a phase of global dynamical instability, but…
In order to detect and characterise cold extended circumstellar dust originating from collisions of planetesimal bodies in disks, belts, or rings at Kuiper-Belt distances (30-50 AU or beyond) sensitive submillimetre observations are…
We investigate how the formation and evolution of extrasolar planetary systems can be affected by stellar encounters that occur in the crowded conditions of a stellar cluster. Using plausible estimates of cluster evolution, we show how…
Much of the dynamical structure of the Kuiper belt can be explained if Neptune migrated over several AU, and/or if Neptune was scattered to an eccentric orbit during planetary instability. An outstanding problem with the existing formation…
Direct imaging has revealed exoplanet systems hosting multiple wide-orbit Super-Jupiters, where planet-planet interactions can shape their long-term dynamical evolution. These strong perturbations may lead to orbital instability, raising…
Inspired by the recent Kepler discoveries of circumbinary planets orbiting nine close binary stars, we explore the fate of the former as the latter evolve off the main sequence. We combine binary star evolution models with dynamical…
We explore the dynamical evolution of a planet embedded in a disk surrounding a star part of a binary system where the orbital plane of the binary is significantly tilted respect to the initial disk plane. Our aim is to test whether the…
It is likely that multiple bodies with masses between those of Mars and Earth ("planetary embryos") formed in the outer planetesimal disk of the solar system. Some of these were likely scattered by the giant planets into orbits with…
We carry out N-body simulations to examine the effects of dynamical interactions on planetary systems in young open star clusters. We explore how the planetary populations in these star clusters evolve, and how this evolution depends on the…
The asteroid belt was dynamically shaped during and after planet formation. Despite representing a broad ring of stable orbits, the belt contains less than one one-thousandth of an Earth mass. The asteroid orbits are dynamically excited…
Planet formation is often considered in the context of one circumstellar disk around one star. Yet stellar binary systems are ubiquitous, and thus a substantial fraction of all potential planets must form and evolve in more complex,…
Nearly one-third of objects occupying the most circular, coplanar Kuiper belt orbits (the cold classical belt) are binary, and several percent of them are "ultra-wide" binaries (UWBs): 100-km-sized companions spaced by tens of thousands of…
We study the orbital evolution of the 4 giant planets of our solar system in a gas disk. Our investigation extends the previous works by Masset and Snellgrove (2001) and Morbidelli and Crida (2007, MC07), which focussed on the dynamics of…
This paper reviews the theory of protostellar debris disks. After a brief introduction to accretion disk physics, I describe coagulation models of planet formation in the outer regions of planetesimal disks. Coagulation models for the…
Recently, a number of planets orbiting binary stars have been discovered by the Kepler space telescope. In a few systems the planets reside close to the dynamical stability limit. Due to the difficulty of forming planets in such close…
Short-period super-Earths and mini-Neptunes encircle more than $\sim50\%$ of Sun-like stars and are relatively amenable to direct observational characterization. Despite this, environments in which these planets accrete are difficult to…