Related papers: Giant Planets from the Inside-Out
The formation history of giant planets inside and outside the solar system remains unknown. We suggest that runaway gas accretion is initiated only at a mass of ~100 M_Earth and that this mass corresponds to the transition to a gas giant, a…
The hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered in the past two decades offer a new perspective on planetary structure. Instead of being the archetypal examples of planets, those of our Solar System are merely possible outcomes of…
The commonality of collisionally replenished debris around main sequence stars suggests that minor bodies are frequent around Sun-like stars. Whether or not debris disks in general are accompanied by planets is yet unknown, but debris disks…
In the last decade, about a dozen giant exoplanets have been directly imaged in the IR as companions to young stars. With photometry and spectroscopy of these planets in hand from new extreme coronagraphic instruments such as SPHERE at VLT…
Most our knowledge about rocky exoplanets is based on their measure of mass and radius. These two parameters are routinely measured and are used to categorise different populations of observed exoplanets. They are also tightly linked to the…
Planet formation is directly linked to the birthing environment that protoplanetary disks provide. The disk properties determine whether a giant planet will form and how it evolves. The number of exoplanet and disk observations is…
Recent observational findings have suggested a positive correlation between the occurrence rates of inner super-Earths and outer giant planets. These results raise the question of whether this trend can be reproduced and explained by planet…
Giant planet embryos are believed to be spawned by gravitational instability in massive extended (R ~ 100 AU) protostellar discs. In a recent paper we have shown that dust can sediment inside the embryos, as argued earlier by Boss (1998) in…
Planet formation occurs around a wide range of stellar masses and stellar system architectures. An improved understanding of the formation process can be achieved by studying it across the full parameter space, particularly toward the…
We present here observational evidence that the snowline plays a significant role in the formation and evolution of gas giant planets. When considering the population of observed exoplanets, we find a boundary in mass-semimajor axis space…
The accretion of icy and rocky solids during the formation of a gas giant planet is poorly constrained and challenging to model. Refractory species, like sulfur, are only present in solids in the protoplanetary disk where planets form.…
Our recent N-body simulations of planetary system formation, incorporating models for the main physical processes thought to be important during the building of planets (i.e. gas disc evolution, migration, planetesimal/boulder accretion,…
The terrestrial and gas-giant planets in our solar system may represent some prototypes for planets around other stars; the exoplanets because most stars have similar overall elemental abundances as our sun. The solar system planets…
In order to understand the atmospheres as well as the formation mechanism of giant planets formed outside our solar system, the next decade will require an investment in studies of isolated young brown dwarfs. In this white paper we…
The two current models for giant planet formation are core accretion and disk instability. We discuss the core masses and overall planetary enrichment in heavy elements predicted by the two formation models, and show that both models could…
Exoplanetary systems host giant planets on substantially non-circular, close-in orbits. We propose that these eccentricities arise in a phase of giant impacts, analogous to the final stage of Solar System assembly that formed Earth's Moon.…
The weather layers of the gas giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, comprise the shallow atmospheric layers that are influenced energetically by a combination of incoming solar radiation and localised latent heating of condensates, as well as…
We present a new numerical framework to model the formation and evolution of giant planets. The code is based on the further development of the stellar evolution toolkit Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA). The model…
Although current sensitivity limits are such that true Solar System analogs remain challenging to detect, numerous planetary systems have been discovered that are very different from our own Solar System. The majority of systems harbor a…
We run numerical simulations to study the accretion of gas and dust grains onto gas giant planets embedded into massive protoplanetary discs. The outcome is found to depend on the disc cooling rate, planet mass, grain size and irradiative…