Related papers: Rapid destruction of planetary debris around white…
The expectation that aerodynamic drag will force the solids in a gas-rich protoplanetary disk to spiral in toward the host star on short timescales is one of the fundamental problems in planet formation theory. The nominal efficiency of…
Protoplanetary disks are quasi-steady structures whose evolution and dispersal determine the environment for planet formation. I review the theory of protoplanetary disk evolution and its connection to observations. Substantial progress has…
Planetesimals are born fragile and are subject to destruction by wind erosion as they move through the gas of a protoplanetary disk. In microgravity experiments, we determined the shear stress necessary for erosion of a surface consisting…
A significant fraction of white dwarfs (WDs) host dust/debris disks formed from the tidal disruption of asteroids and planetesimals. Several studies indicate that the disks can attain significant vertical heights through collisional…
Observed protoplanetary disks consist of a large amount of micrometer-sized particles. Dullemond and Dominik (2005) pointed out for the first time the difficulty in explaining the strong mid-IR excess of classical T-Tauri stars without any…
White dwarfs which exhibit transit signatures of planetary debris and accreted planetary material provide exceptional opportunities to probe the material composition and dynamical structure of planetary systems. Although previous…
The first stages of planet formation take place in protoplanetary disks that are largely made up of gas. Understanding how the gas affects planetesimals in the protoplanetary disk is therefore essential. In this paper, we discuss whether or…
We present models for the formation of terrestrial planets, and the collisional evolution of debris disks, in planetary systems that contain multiple unstable gas giants. We previously showed that the dynamics of the giant planets…
Dynamical activity attributed to the destruction of minor planets orbiting white dwarfs has now been photometrically monitored in individual systems for up to one decade, long enough to measure significant cessation and re-emergence of…
Studies of debris disks around white dwarfs (WDs) have focused on infrared wavelengths because debris disks are much colder than the star and are believed to contribute to the spectrum only at longer wavelengths. Nevertheless, these disks…
Many white dwarfs host disks of dust produced by disintegrating planetesimals and revealed by infrared excesses. The disk around G29-38 was the first to be discovered and is now well-observed, yet we lack a cohesive picture of its geometry…
Although there is abundant and diverse observational evidence in support of white dwarf stars hosting planets or debris disks which form in the catastrophic destruction of various planetary bodies, the key processes that explain these…
Rapid orbital drift of macroscopic dust particles is one of the major obstacles against planetesimal formation in protoplanetary disks. We reexamine this problem by considering porosity evolution of dust aggregates. We apply a porosity…
Planetary systems commonly survive the evolution of single stars, as evidenced by terrestrial-like planetesimal debris observed orbiting and polluting the surfaces of white dwarfs. This letter reports the identification of a circumbinary…
The existence of water in extrasolar planetary systems is of great interest as it constrains the potential for habitable planets and life. Here, we report the identification of a circumstellar disk that resulted from the destruction of a…
Observations of debris disks, the products of the collisional evolution of rocky planetesimals, can be used to trace planetary activity across a wide range of stellar types. The most common end points of stellar evolution are no exception…
The Earth and other rocky bodies in the inner solar system contain significantly less carbon than the primordial materials that seeded their formation. These carbon-poor objects include the parent bodies of primitive meteorites, suggesting…
The solid content of circumstellar disks is inherited from the interstellar medium: dust particles of at most a micrometer in size. Protoplanetary disks are the environment where these dust grains need to grow at least 13 orders of…
One of the first stages of planet formation is the growth of small planetesimals. This early stage occurs much before the dispersal of most of the gas from the protoplanetary disk. Due to their different aerodynamic properties,…
Context. The composition of a protoplanetary disk at a given location does not only depend on temperature and pressure but also on the time dependent transport of matter, such as radial drift of solid bodies, which could release water and…