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Terrestrial exoplanets are on the verge of joining the ranks of astronomically accessible objects. Interpreting their observable characteristics, and informing decisions on instrument design and use, will hinge on the ability to model these…
Many extra-solar planets and a few planetary systems have been found indirectly by small periodic radial velocity variations around old nearby stars. The orbital characteristics of most of them are different from the planets in our solar…
Due to the recent dramatic technological advances, infrared interferometry can now be applied to new classes of objects, resulting in exciting new science prospects, for instance, in the area of high-mass star formation. Although…
Planetary systems toward the Galactic Bulge can be detected through microlensing measurements. The microlensing planet search technique has some unique merits: low-mass planets can be detected from the ground; the Galactic family of…
The discovery of thousands of exoplanets over the last couple of decades has shown that the birth of planets is a very efficient process in nature. Theories invoke a multitude of mechanisms to describe the assembly of planets in the disks…
The radial velocities and direct imaging observations of exoplanets have suggested that the frequency of giant planets may decrease for intermediate-mass stars ($2.5-8\,M_\odot$). The key mechanism that could hinder their formation remains…
The discovery of close orbiting extrasolar giant planets led to extensive studies of disk planet interactions and the forms of migration that can result as a means of accounting for their location. Early work established the type I and type…
The mid-infrared properties of pre-planetary disks are sensitive to the temperature and flaring profiles of disks for the regions where planet formation is expected to occur. In order to constrain theories of planet formation, we have…
Precise measurements of the fundamental properties of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are key to understanding the physics underlying their formation and evolution. While there has been great progress over the last decade in studying the…
Simultaneous space- and ground-based microlensing surveys, such as K2's Campaign 9 (K2C9) and $WFIRST$, facilitate measuring the masses and distances of free-floating planet (FFP) candidates. FFPs are identified as single-lens events with a…
Planetary nebula (PN) surveys in systems beyond ~10 Mpc often find high-excitation, point-like sources with [O III] $\lambda 5007$ fluxes greater than the apparent bright-end cutoff of the planetary nebula luminosity function (PNLF). Here…
Our understanding of the process of terrestrial planet formation has grown markedly over the past 20 years, yet key questions remain. This review begins by first addressing the critical, earliest stage of dust coagulation and concentration.…
Microlensing is the most promising method to study the statistical frequency of extra-solar planets orbiting typical (random) stars in the Milky Way, even those several kiloparsecs from Earth. The lensing zone corresponds to orbital…
We report first results from our ground-based infrared imaging search for sub-stellar companions (brown dwarfs and giant planets) of young (up to 100 Myrs) nearby (up to 75 pc) stars, where companions should be well separated from the…
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…
Formation processes of high-mass stars have been long-standing issues in astronomy and astrophysics. This is mainly because of major difficulties in observational studies such as a smaller number of high-mass young stellar objects (YSOs),…
The addition of Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has led to a dramatic increase in our ability to study the z>6 Universe. The increase in the near-infrared (NIR) sensitivity of WFC3 over previous instruments…
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, the 4 m Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, we have performed deep imaging from 0.8 to 8 um of the southern subcluster in the Chamaeleon I…
As astronomers, we are living an exciting time for what concerns the search for other worlds. Recent discoveries have already deeply impacted our vision of planetary formation and architectures. Future bio-signature discoveries will…
Planet formation in the chemically ancient, dynamically heated Galactic thick disc remains poorly constrained, owing to the expectation that its low solid reservoirs, short disc lifetimes, and harsh irradiation environments inhibit…