Related papers: Terrestrial planet formation from lost inner solar…
We show that interaction with a gas disk may produce young planetary systems with closely-spaced orbits, stabilized by mean-motion resonances between neighbors. On longer timescales, after the gas is gone, interaction with a remnant…
Gas giant planets play a fundamental role in shaping the orbital architecture of planetary systems and in affecting the delivery of volatile materials to terrestrial planets in the habitable zones. Current theories of gas giant planet…
Intermediate mass planets, from Super-Earth to Neptune-sized bodies, are the most common type of planets in the galaxy. The prevailing theory of planet formation, core-accretion, predicts significantly fewer intermediate-mass giant planets…
Because of their common origin, it was assumed that the composition of planet building blocks should, to a first order, correlate with stellar atmospheric composition, especially for refractory elements. In fact, information on the relative…
Recent work has shown that aside from the classical view of collisions by increasingly massive planetesimals, the accretion of mm- to m-sized 'pebbles' can also reproduce the mass-orbit distribution of the terrestrial planets. Here, we…
Core Accretion, the most widely accepted scenario for planet formation, postulates existence of km-sized solid bodies, called planetesimals, arranged in a razor-thin disc in the earliest phases of planet formation. In the Tidal Downsizing…
No terrestrial planet formation simulation completed to date has considered the detailed chemical composition of the planets produced. While many have considered possible water contents and late veneer compositions, none have examined the…
A leading model for the origin of super-Earths proposes that planetary embryos migrate inward and pile up on close-in orbits. As large embryos are thought to preferentially form beyond the snow line, this naively predicts that most…
The ``minimum-mass solar nebula'' (MMSN) model estimates the surface density distribution of the protoplanetary disk by assuming the planets to have formed in situ. However, significant radial migration of the giant planets likely occurred…
The delivery of water to the inner Solar System rocky planets, including Earth, remains debated, as standard models assume that they formed from dry grains, inside the snowline of the protosolar nebula. However, a recent work showed that a…
The Earth appears non-chondritic in its abundances of refractory lithophile elements, posing a significant problem for our understanding of its formation and evolution. It has been suggested that this non-chondritic composition may be…
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…
The formation of planetesimals was an integral part of the cascading series of processes that built the terrestrial planets. To illuminate planetesimal formation, here we develop a refined thermal evolution model to calculate the formation…
Life on Earth emerged at the interface of the geosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. This setting serves as our basis for how biological systems originate on rocky planets. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that the chemical nature of…
A question central to understanding the origin of our solar system is: how do planets form in circumstellar disks around young stars? Because of the complex nature of the physical processes involved, multi-wavelength observations of large…
Recent direct imaging discoveries suggest a new class of massive, distant planets around A stars. These widely separated giants have been interpreted as signs of planet formation driven by gravitational instability, but the viability of…
Solar and extrasolar planets are the subject of numerous studies aiming to determine their chemical composition and internal structure. In the case of extrasolar planets, the composition is important as it partly governs their potential…
If the photospheres of solar-type stars represent the composition of circumstellar disks from which any planets formed, spectroscopic determinations of stellar elemental abundances offer information on the composition of those planets,…
Carbonaceous chondrites are samples from planetesimals that formed 2-4 million years after solar system formation began. They consist of distinct dust components formed at different times and locations in the accretion disk and whose…
Several hundred stars older than 10 million years have been observed to have infrared excesses. These observations are explained by dust grains formed by the collisional fragmentation of hidden planetesimals. Such dusty planetesimal discs…