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A critical step toward the emergence of planets in a protoplanetary disk consists in accretion of planetesimals, bodies 1-1000 km in size, from smaller disk constituents. This process is poorly understood partly because we lack good…
(abridged) Debris disks around main sequence stars are produced by the erosion and evaporation of unseen parent bodies. AU Microscopii (GJ 803) is a compelling object to study in the context of disk evolution across different spectral…
In spite of making a small contribution to total protoplanetary disk mass, dust affects the disk temperature by controlling absorption of starlight. As grains grow from their initial ISM-like size distribution, settling depletes the disk's…
Current observations indicate that the planet formation process often produces multiple planet systems with nearly circular orbits, regular spacing, a narrow range of inclination angles, and similar planetary masses of order $m_{\rm…
Debris discs are our best means to probe the outer regions of planetary systems. Many studies assume that planets lie at the inner edges of debris discs, akin to Neptune and the Kuiper Belt, and use the disc morphologies to constrain those…
Most stars are in multiple systems, with the majority of those being binaries. A large number of planets have been confirmed in binary stars and therefore it is important to understand their formation and dynamical evolution. We perform…
The physics of planet formation is investigated using a population synthesis approach. We develop a simple model for planetary growth including pebble and gas accretion, and orbital migration in an evolving protoplanetary disk. The model is…
Planets are supposed to form in circumstellar disks. The gravitational potential of a planet perturbs the disk and leads to characteristic structures, i.e. spiral waves and gaps, in the disk's density profile. We perform a large-scale…
Core accretion and disk instability have traditionally been regarded as the two competing possible paths of planet formation. In recent years, evidence have accumulated in favor of core accretion as the dominant mode, at least for close-in…
Microlensing is a proven extrasolar planet search method that has already yielded the detection of four exoplanets. These detections have changed our understanding of planet formation ``beyond the snowline'' by demonstrating that…
Both core accretion and disk instability appear to be required as formation mechanisms in order to explain the entire range of giant planets found in extrasolar planetary systems. Disk instability is based on the formation of clumps in a…
$\Lambda$CDM cosmology predicts the hierarchical formation of galaxies which build up mass by merger events and accreting smaller systems. The stellar halo of the Milky Way has proven to be useful a tool for tracing this accretion history.…
The nearly circular (mean eccentricity <e>~0.06) and coplanar (mean mutual inclination <i>~3 deg) orbits of the Solar System planets motivated Kant and Laplace to put forth the hypothesis that planets are formed in disks, which has…
(abridged) We investigate the possibility to recognize the magnetic field structures in nearby galaxies and to test the cosmological evolution of their large- and small-scale magnetic fields with the SKA and its precursors. We estimate the…
The discovery of thousands of exoplanets has shown that the birth of planets is a very efficient process in nature. Several physical mechanisms have been proposed to describe the assembly of planets in disks surrounding young stars.…
Much of our understanding of dark matter halos comes from the assumption that the mass-to-light ratio (M/L) of spiral disks is constant. The best way to test this hypothesis is to measure the disk surface mass density directly via the…
In a turbulent proto-planetary disk, dust grains undergo large density fluctuations and under the right circumstances, these grain overdensities can overcome shear, turbulent, and gas pressure support to collapse under self-gravity (forming…
The discovery of planets in close orbits around binary stars raises questions about their formation. It is believed that these planets formed in the outer regions of the disc and then migrated through planet-disc interaction to their…
We present a thorough study of the impact of a migrating planet on a planetesimal disk, by exploring a broad range of masses and eccentricities for the planet. We discuss the sensitivity of the structures generated in debris disks to the…
We try here to find new constraints on thick disk population using samples at intermediate latitude and North Galactic Pole, which include photometry and proper motions. The algorithm SEM (Stochastic-Estimation-Maximization; Celeux \&…