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So far, more than 130 extrasolar planets have been found in multiple stellar systems. Dynamical simulations show that the outcome of the planetary formation process can lead to different planetary architectures (i.e. location, size, mass,…

Asteroids and meteorites provide key evidence on the formation of planetesimals in the Solar System. Asteroids are traditionally thought to form in a bottom-up process by coagulation within a population of initially km-scale planetesimals.…

Context. Near- and mid-infrared observations have revealed the presence of organic refractory materials in the solar system, in cometary nuclei and on the surface of centaurs, Kuiper-belt and trans-neptunian objects. In these astrophysical…

[Abridged] Planets and their atmospheres are built from gas and solid material in protoplanetary disks. This solid material grows from smaller, micron-sized grains to larger sizes in the disks, during the process of planet formation. Our…

Recent detection of exoplanets with Earth-like insolation attracts growing interest in how common Earth-like aqua planets are beyond the solar system. While terrestrial planets are often assumed to capture icy or water-rich planetesimals, a…

Aims. We study the formation and water delivery of planets in the habitable zone (HZ) around solar-type stars. In particular, we study different dynamical environments that are defined by the most massive body in the system. Methods. First…

The locations of the fully despun, double synchronous end states of tidal evolution are derived for spherical components. With the exception of nearly equal-mass binaries, binary asteroid systems are in the midst of lengthy tidal…

The measured nitrogen-to-carbon ratio in comets is lower than for the Sun, a discrepancy which could be alleviated if there is an unknown reservoir of nitrogen in comets. The nucleus of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko exhibits an…

Understanding the chemical past of our Sun and how life appeared on Earth is no mean feat. The best strategy we can adopt is to study newborn stars located in an environment similar to the one in which our Sun was born and assess their…

The puzzling complexity of terrestrial biomolecules is driving the search for complex organic molecules in the Interstellar Medium (ISM) and serves as a motivation for many in situ studies of reservoirs of extraterrestrial organics from…

[Abridged] Asteroid mining is not necessarily a distant prospect. Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx have recently rendezvoused with near-Earth asteroids and will return samples to Earth. While there is significant science motivation for these…

We present a basic, fast, and flexible planet formation model, called SimAb (Simulating Abundances), to form giant planets and study their primary atmospheric composition soon after their formation. In SimAb we introduce parameters to…

Organic material in anoxic sediment represents a globally significant carbon reservoir that acts to stabilize Earth's atmospheric composition. The dynamics by which microbes organize to consume this material remain poorly understood. Here…

Context. Time dependent gas-grain chemistry can help us understand the layered structure of species deposited onto the surface of grains during the lifetime of a protoplanetary disk. The history of trapping important quantities of carbon-…

Amino acids in solar system bodies may have played a key role in the chemistry that led to the origin of life on Earth. We present laboratory studies testing the stability of amino acids against gamma radiation photolysis. All the 20 chiral…

Water reservoirs in the Solar System exhibit a deuterium enrichment that links back to the physical environment at the time of stellar birth. Gas-phase and ice-grain deuterium enrichments occur through chemical processes that operate at low…

We investigate the role of secular and mean motion resonances on the water transport from a belt of icy asteroids onto planets or embryos orbiting inside the circumprimary habitable zone (HZ) of a binary star system. In addition, the…

Many complex organic molecules (COMs) in star-forming regions are believed to form on dust grains. We thus expect both the reduced metallicity and dust-to-gas ratio in the outer Galaxy to have an impact on the chemical composition of these…

Comets contain abundant amounts of organic and inorganic species. Many of the volatile molecules in comets have also been observed in the interstellar medium and some of them even with similar relative abundances, indicating formation under…

During the formation of terrestrial planets, volatile loss may occur through nebular processing, planetesimal differentiation, and planetary accretion. We investigate iron meteorites as an archive of volatile loss during planetesimal…