Related papers: Planet Formation
Planets are typically thought to form in protoplanetary disks left over from protostellar disk of their newly formed host star. However, an additional planetary formation route may exist in old evolved binary systems. In such systems…
Discs of gas and dust around Myr-old stars are a by-product of the star formation process and provide the raw material to form planets. Hence, their evolution and dispersal directly impact what type of planets can form and affect the final…
In the present-day universe, it appears that most, and perhaps all, massive stars are born in star clusters. It also appears that all star clusters contain stars drawn from an approximately universal initial mass function, so that almost…
The solar system started to form about 4.56 Gyr ago and despite the long intervening time span, there still exist several clues about its formation. The three major sources for this information are meteorites, the present solar system…
While it is widely accepted that planets are formed in protoplanetary disks, there is still much debate on when this process happens. In a few cases protoplanets have been directly imaged, but for the vast majority of systems, disk gaps and…
The discovery of planets around massive stars is important for understanding how planet formation and evolution is conditioned by different stellar environments. However, current planetary search surveys have failed to detect planets around…
In the nucleated instability picture of gas giant formation, the final stage is the rapid accretion of a massive gas envelope by a solid core, bringing about a tenfold or more increase in mass. This tends to trigger the scattering of any…
Understanding how giant and terrestrial planets form and evolve, what is their internal structure and that of their atmosphere, represents one of the major challenges of modern astronomy, which is directly connected to the ultimate search…
A planet is an end product of disk accretion around a primary star or substar. I quantify this definition by the degree to which a body dominates the other masses that share its orbital zone. Theoretical and observational measures of…
The diversity in mass and composition of planetary atmospheres stems from the different building blocks present in protoplanetary discs and from the different physical and chemical processes that these experience during the planetary…
In this chapter, we review the processes involved in the formation of planetesimals and comets. We will start with a description of the physics of dust grain growth and how this is mediated by gas-dust interactions in planet-forming disks.…
From wispy gas giants on the verge of disruption to tiny rocky bodies already falling apart, short-period exoplanets pose a severe puzzle to theories of planet formation and orbital evolution. By far most of the planets known beyond the…
We review the current theoretical understanding how growth from micro-meter sized dust to massive giant planets occurs in disks around young stars. After introducing a number of observational constraints from the solar system, from observed…
The formation of stars, particularly the high-mass star formation, poses several still open questions. Nowadays, thanks to the most modern telescopes and instruments, we are able to observe and analyse many physical and chemical processes…
A planetary system may undergo significant radial rearrangement during the early part of its lifetime. Planet migration can come about through interaction with the surrounding planetesimal disk and the gas disk--while the latter is still…
In this article, I examine several observational trends regarding protoplanetary disks, debris disks and exoplanets in binary systems in an attempt to constrain the physical mechanisms of planet formation in such a context. Binaries wider…
We have now accumulated a wealth of observations of the planet-formation environment and of mature planetary systems. These data allow us to test and refine theories of gas-giant planet formation by placing constraints on the conditions and…
The large number of exoplanets found to orbit their host stars in very close orbits have significantly advanced our understanding of the planetary formation process. It is now widely accepted that such short-period planets cannot have…
Observations made using large ground-based and space-borne telescopes have probed cosmic history all the way from the present-day to a time when the Universe was less than a tenth of its present age. Earlier on lies the remaining frontier,…
To date, two planetary systems have been discovered with close-in, terrestrial-mass planets (< 5-10 Earth masses). Many more such discoveries are anticipated in the coming years with radial velocity and transit searches. Here we investigate…