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Many ground-based photometric surveys are now under way, and five of them have been successful at detecting transiting exoplanets. Nevertheless, detecting transiting planets has turned out to be much more challenging than initially…
Despite the revolution in our knowledge resulting from the detection of planets around mature stars, we know almost nothing about planets orbiting young stars because rapid rotation and active photospheres preclude detection by radial…
The $\sim$5 Myr PDS 70 is the only known system with protoplanets residing in the cavity of the circumstellar disk from which they formed, ideal for studying exoplanet formation and evolution within its natal environment. Here we report the…
The discovery of planets orbiting at less than 1 au from their host star and less massive than Saturn in various exoplanetary systems revolutionized our theories of planetary formation. The fundamental question is whether these close-in…
Our understanding of protoplanetary disks has greatly improved over the last decade due to a wealth of data from new facilities. Unbiased dust surveys with Spitzer leave us with good constraints on the dust dispersal timescale of small…
The advent of extremely large telescopes will bring unprecedented light-collecting power and spatial resolution, but it will also lead to a significant increase in the size and complexity of focal-plane instruments. The use of freeform…
Observations of star-forming regions by the current and upcoming generation of submillimeter polarimeters will shed new light on the evolution of magnetic fields over the cloud-to-core size scales involved in the early stages of the star…
Long baseline interferometry of microlensing events can resolve the individual images of the source produced by the lens, which combined with the modelling of the microlensing light curve, leads to the exact lens mass and distance.…
In the past few years, there has been a resurgence in studies towards space-based optical/infrared interferometry, particularly with the vision to use the technique to discover and characterise temperate Earth-like exoplanets around solar…
Imaging circumstellar disks in the near-infrared provides unprecedented information about the formation and evolution of planetary systems. However, current post-processing techniques for high-contrast imaging using ground-based telescopes…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
A detailed understanding of the physics of star and planet formation requires study of individual objects as well as statistical assessment of global properties and evolutionary trends. Observational investigations of circumstellar material…
Over the last few years, many close orbiting ($\sim 0.05$ A.U.) large mass planets ($\sim M_{J}$) of nearby stars have been discovered. Their existence has been inferred from tiny Doppler shifts in the light from the star and in one case a…
The recent detection of the Cosmic Infrared Background in FIRAS and DIRBE residuals, and the observations of IR/submm sources by the ISOPHOT and SCUBA instruments have shed new light on the optically dark side of galaxy formation. It turns…
Mid-infrared imaging traces the sub-micron and micron sized dust grains in protoplanetary disks and it offers constraints on the geometrical properties of the disks and potential companions, particularly if those companions have…
The occurrence rate of long-period giant planets around young stars is highly uncertain since it is not only governed by the protoplanetary disc structure and planet formation process, but also reflects dynamical re-structuring processes…
Traditional approaches to measuring the stellar mass function (MF) are fundamentally limited because objects are detected based on their luminosity, not their mass. These methods are thereby restricted to luminous and relatively nearby…
When the planet formation process begins in the disks surrounding young stars is still an open question. Annular substructures such as rings and gaps in disks are intertwined with planet formation, and thus their presence or absence is…
Because planets are not expected to be able to form close to stars due to the high temperatures, it has been suggested that the observed close orbiting ($\sim 0.05$ AU) large mass planets ($\sim M_J$) might be mirror worlds -- planets…
In this paper, we calculate simulated scattered light images of a circumstellar disk in which a planet is forming by gravitational instability. The simulated images bear no correlation to the vertically integrated surface density of the…