Related papers: Planetary mass-radius relations across the galaxy
We model the evolution of planets with various masses and compositions. We investigate the effects of the composition and its depth dependence on the long-term evolution of the planets. The effects of opacity and stellar irradiation are…
Debris disks are the dust disks found around ~20% of nearby main sequence stars in far-IR surveys. They can be considered as descendants of protoplanetary disks or components of planetary systems, providing valuable information on…
We have examined the resolved stellar populations at large galactocentric distances along the minor axis (from 10 kpc up to between 40 and 75 kpc), with limited major axis coverage, of six nearby highly-inclined Milky Way-mass disc galaxies…
Rocky planets in compact configurations are the most common ones around M dwarfs. Many disks around very low mass stars (between 0.1 and 0.5 M$_\odot$) are rather compact and small (without observable substructures and radius less than 20…
Observations of exoplanets and protoplanetary disks show that binary stellar systems can host planets in stable orbits. Given the high binary fraction among stars, the contribution of binary systems to Galactic habitability should be…
The exoplanet mass radius diagram reveals that super Earths display a wide range of radii, and therefore mean densities, at a given mass. Using planet population synthesis models, we explore the key physical factors that shape this…
Close binary systems present challenges to planet formation. As binary separations decrease, so too do the occurrence rates of protoplanetary disks in young systems and planets in mature systems. For systems that do retain disks, their disk…
Analysis of the statistical properties of exoplanets, together with those of their host stars, are providing a unique view into the process of planet formation and evolution. In this paper we explore the properties of the mass distribution…
The gas and solid-state C/O ratios provide context to potentially link the atmospheric composition of planets to that of the natal disk. We provide a synthesis of extant estimates of the gaseous C/O and C/H ratios in planet-forming disks…
The evolution of protoplanetary discs embedded in stellar clusters depends on the age and the stellar density in which they are embedded. Stellar clusters of young age and high stellar surface density destroy protoplanetary discs by…
The study of the Milky Way stellar discs in the context of galaxy formation is discussed. In particular we explore the properties of the Milky Way disc using a new sample of about 550 dwarf stars for which we have recently obtained…
Intermediate mass planets, from Super-Earth to Neptune-sized bodies, are the most common type of planets in the galaxy. The prevailing theory of planet formation, core-accretion, predicts significantly fewer intermediate-mass giant planets…
We present first results from a program to measure the chemical abundances of a large (N>30) sample of thick disk stars with the principal goal of investigating the formation history of the Galactic thick disk. Our analysis confirms…
We estimated the galactic model parameters for a set of 20 intermediate-latitude fields with galactic longitudes 0<l<100 and 160<l<240, included in the currently available Data Release 6 (DR6) of SDSS, to explore their possible variation…
We have investigated the problem of the distribution of both masses and orbital radii of planets resulting from the gas-accretion, gas-capture model. First we followed the evolution of gas and solids from the moment where all solids are in…
Terrestrial planets are thought to be the result of a vast number of gravitational interactions and collisions between smaller bodies. We use numerical simulations to show that practically identical initial conditions result in a wide array…
Direct imaging searches have begun to detect planetary and brown dwarf companions and to place constraints on the presence of giant planets at large separations from their host star. This work helps to motivate such planet searches by…
Binary star systems are assumed to be co-natal and coeval, thus to have identical chemical composition. In this work we aim to test the hypothesis that there is a connection between observed element abundance patterns and the formation of…
Context: The Milky Way contains a thick and a thin disc that differ in chemical, kinematic, structural, and spatial properties. There is significant overlap in the distributions of these properties, especially so at higher metallicities.…
Binary stars and higher-order multiple systems are an ubiquitous outcome of star formation, especially as the system mass increases. The companion mass-ratio distribution is a unique probe into the conditions of the collapsing cloud core…