Related papers: Planetary Genealogy
Most stars, perhaps even all stars, form in crowded stellar environments. Such star forming regions typically dissolve within ten million years, while others remain bound as stellar groupings for hundreds of millions to billions of years,…
Chemical and chronological information preserved in meteorites permits the reconstruction of events and processes in the solar nebula from the formation of the first solids to the accretion of planetary bodies and their subsequent…
We demonstrate that a seismic analysis of stars in their earliest evolutionary phases is a powerful method to identify young stars and distinguish their evolutionary states. The early star that is born from the gravitational collapse of a…
The characterization of exoplanets and their birth protoplanetary disks has enormously advanced in the last decade. Benefitting from that, our global understanding of the planet formation processes has been substantially improved. In this…
The study of our Solar System -- its formation, evolution, and long-term stability -- has been ongoing for centuries and is now a standard part of scientific education. While the formation of other Solar-like exoplanetary systems is…
Studying exoplanets with their parent stars is crucial to understand their population, formation and history. We review some of the key questions regarding their evolution with particular emphasis on giant gaseous exoplanets orbiting close…
Protoplanetary disks are quasi-steady structures whose evolution and dispersal determine the environment for planet formation. I review the theory of protoplanetary disk evolution and its connection to observations. Substantial progress has…
Meteorites trace planet formation in the Sun's protoplanetary disk, but they also record the influence of the Sun's birth environment. Whether the Sun formed in a region like Taurus-Auriga with ~10^2 stars, or a region like the Carina…
Since very recently, we acquired knowledge on the existence of comets in extrasolar planetary systems. The formation of comets together with planets around host stars now seems evident. As stars are often born in clusters of interstellar…
Exoplanets around different types of stars provide a window into the diverse environments in which planets form. This chapter describes the observed relations between exoplanet populations and stellar properties and how they connect to…
The basic geometry of the Solar System -- the shapes, spacings, and orientations of the planetary orbits -- has long been a subject of fascination as well as inspiration for planet formation theories. For exoplanetary systems, those same…
Progressive astronomical characterization of planet-forming disks and rocky exoplanets highlight the need for increasing interdisciplinary efforts to understand the birth and life cycle of terrestrial worlds in a unified picture. Here, we…
There is strong evidence that the planets in the solar system evolved from a disk-shaped solar nebula ~4.56 Gyr ago. By studying young stars in various evolutionary stages, one aims at tracing back the early history of the solar system, in…
The discovery of thousands of exoplanets over the last couple of decades has shown that the birth of planets is a very efficient process in nature. Theories invoke a multitude of mechanisms to describe the assembly of planets in the disks…
Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…
A number of objects in primitive meteorites have oxygen isotopic compositions that place them on a distinct, mass-independent fractionation line with a slope of one on a three-isotope plot. The most popular model for describing how this…
With the increasing number of detected exoplanet samples, the statistical properties of planetary systems have become much clearer. In this review, we summarize the major statistics that have been revealed mainly by radial velocity and…
Super-Earths and sub-Neptunes represent the most common class of exoplanets discovered to date in our galaxy, yet they have no direct analogues in the Solar System. Since 2014, researchers within the NCCR PlanetS have made significant…
Planetary satellites are an integral part of the heirarchy of planetary systems. Here we make two predictions concerning their formation. First, primordial satellites, which have an array of distinguishing characteristics, form only around…
This review provides an introduction to presolar grains - preserved stardust from the interstellar molecular cloud from which our solar system formed - found in primitive meteorites. We describe the search for the presolar components, the…