Related papers: TYCHO -- Realistically Simulating Exoplanets withi…
Stellar encounters potentially affect the evolution of the protoplanetary discs in the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC). However, the role of encounters in other cluster environments is less known. We investigate the effect of the…
The collection of planetary system properties derived from large surveys such as Kepler provides critical constraints on planet formation and evolution. These constraints can only be applied to planet formation models, however, if the…
Open clusters potentially provide an ideal environment for the search for transiting extrasolar planets since they feature a relatively large number of stars of the same known age and metallicity at the same distance. With this motivation,…
Spurred by the discovery of numerous exoplanets in multiple systems, binaries have become in recent years one of the main topics in planet formation research. Numerous studies have investigated to what extent the presence of a stellar…
Although debris disks may be common in exoplanet systems, only a few systems are known in which debris disks and planets coexist. Planets and the surrounding stellar population can have a significant impact on debris disk evolution. Here we…
Exoplanet discoveries have motivated numerous efforts to find unseen populations of exomoons, yet they have been unsuccessful. A plausible explanation is that most discovered planets are located on close-in orbits, which would make their…
The Kepler Mission is exploring the diversity of planets and planetary systems. Its legacy will be a catalog of discoveries sufficient for computing planet occurrence rates as a function of size, orbital period, star-type, and insolation…
Previous investigations have revealed that eccentric super-Earths represent a class of planets which are particularly effective at transporting minor bodies towards white dwarfs and subsequently polluting their atmospheres with observable…
The knowledge of the ages of stars hosting exoplanets allows us to obtain an overview on the evolution of exoplanets and understand the mechanisms affecting their life. The measurement of the ages of stars in the Galaxy is usually affected…
We review recent work that investigates the formation of stellar clusters, ranging in scale from globular clusters through open clusters to the small scale aggregates of stars observed in T associations. In all cases, recent advances in…
Stellar systems are broadly divided into collisional and non-collisional. The latter are large-N systems with long relaxation timescales and can be simulated disregarding two-body interactions, while either computationally expensive direct…
We study the dynamical evolution of globular clusters using our H\'enon-type Monte Carlo code for stellar dynamics including all relevant physics such as two-body relaxation, single and binary stellar evolution, Galactic tidal stripping,…
In clustered environments, stellar encounters can liberate planets from their host stars via close encounters. Although the detection probability of planets suggests that the planet population in open clusters resembles that in the field,…
We introduce ECCOplanets, an open-source Python code that simulates condensation in the protoplanetary disk. Our aim is to analyse how well a simplistic model can reproduce the main characteristics of rocky planet formation. For this…
N-body simulations give us a rough idea of how the shape of a simulated object appears in three-dimensional space. From an observational point of view this may give us a misleading picture. The faint stars may be the most common stars in…
We present first results from the Survey for Transiting Extrasolar Planets in Stellar Systems (STEPSS). Our goal is to assess the frequency of close-in extrasolar planets around main-sequence stars in several open clusters. By concentrating…
Most stars and thus most planetary systems do not form in isolation. The larger star-forming environment affects protoplanetary disks in multiple ways: gravitational interactions with other stars truncate disks and alter the architectures…
Previous studies using Kepler data suggest that planets orbiting the same star tend to have similar sizes. However, due to the faintness of the stars, only a few of the planets were also detected with radial velocity follow-ups, and…
The diversity of dynamical conditions among exoplanets is now well established. Yet, the relevance of orbital dynamical timescales to biological evolutionary timescales is poorly understood. Given that even minor orbital changes may place…
During their main sequence lifetimes, the majority of all Galactic Disc field stars must endure at least one stellar intruder passing within a few hundred AU. Mounting observations of planet-star separations near or beyond this distance…