Related papers: Radioactive Planet Formation
The formation of planets is one of the major unsolved problems in modern astrophysics. Planets are believed to form out of the material in circumstellar disks known to exist around young stars, and which are a by-product of the star…
The recent detection of planets around very low mass stars raises the question of the formation, composition and potential habitability of these objects. We use planetary system formation models to infer the properties, in particular their…
Star and planet formation are inextricably linked. In the earliest phases of the collapse of a protostar a disc forms around the young star and such discs are observed for the first several million years of a star's life. It is within these…
A key question in astronomy is how ubiquitous Earth-like rocky planets are. The formation of terrestrial planets in our solar system was strongly influenced by the radioactive decay heat of short-lived radionuclides (SLRs), particularly…
In recent years a paradigm shift has occurred in exoplanet science, wherein low-mass stars are increasingly viewed as a foundational pillar of the search for potentially habitable worlds in the solar neighborhood. However, the formation…
Meteorites, which are remnants of solar system formation, provide a direct glimpse into the dynamics and evolution of a young stellar object (YSO), namely our Sun. Much of our knowledge about the astrophysical context of the birth of the…
As stellar compositions evolve over time in the Milky Way, so will the resulting planet populations. In order to place planet formation in the context of Galactic chemical evolution, we make use of a large ($N = 5\,325$) stellar sample…
Terrestrial planets form in a series of dynamical steps from the solid component of circumstellar disks. First, km-sized planetesimals form likely via a combination of sticky collisions, turbulent concentration of solids, and gravitational…
Stars and planets are the fundamental objects of the Universe. Their formation processes, though related, may differ in important ways. Stars almost certainly form from gravitational collapse and probably have formed this way since the…
We consider trends resulting from two formation mechanisms for short-period super-Earths: planet-planet scattering and migration. We model scenarios where these planets originate near the snow line in ``cold finger'' circumstellar disks.…
Exoplanet demographic surveys have revealed that close-in (${\lesssim}$1 au) small planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way's thick disk are ${\sim}50\%$ less abundant than those orbiting stars in the Galactic thin disk. One key difference…
To date, several exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars with close binary companions (a~<30 AU). The fact that planets can form in these dynamically challenging environments implies that planet formation must be a robust process.…
In addition to long-lived radioactive nuclei like U and Th isotopes, which have been used to measure the age of the Galaxy, also radioactive nuclei with half-lives between 0.1 and 100 million years (short-lived radionuclides, SLRs) were…
We reconsider the commonly held assumption that warm debris disks are tracers of terrestrial planet formation. The high occurrence rate inferred for Earth-mass planets around mature solar-type stars based on exoplanet surveys (roughly 20%)…
Carbon is produced during the helium burning phase of sufficiently massive stars through the triple alpha process. The $0^+$ energy level of the carbon nucleus allows for resonant nuclear reactions, which act to greatly increase the carbon…
We develop a semi-analytic model for planet formation during the pre-main sequence contraction phase of a low mass star. During this evolution, the stellar magnetosphere maintains a fixed ratio between the inner disk radius and the stellar…
Most star formation in the Galaxy takes place in clusters, where the most massive members can affect the properties of other constituent solar systems. This paper considers how clusters influence star formation and forming planetary systems…
Planets are a natural byproduct of the stellar formation process, resulting from local aggregations of material within the disks surrounding young stars. Whereas signatures of gas-giant planets at large orbital separations have been…
Most of our current understanding of the planet formation mechanism is based on the planet metallicity correlation derived mostly from solar-type stars harbouring gas-giant planets. To achieve a far more reaching grasp on the substellar…
Meteorite studies have revealed the presence of short-lived radioactivities in the early solar system. The current data suggests that the origin of at least some of the radioactivities requires contribution from recent nucleosynthesis at a…