Related papers: Dynamics of young stellar clusters as planet formi…
Protoplanetary disks are the birthplaces of planetary systems. The evolution of the star-disk system and the disk chemical composition determines the initial conditions for planet formation. Therefore a comprehensive understanding of the…
Planets form and obtain their compositions from the leftover material present in protoplanetary disks of dust and gas surrounding young stars. The chemical make-up of a disk influences every aspect of planetary composition including their…
Planets form in disks around young stars. Interactions with these disks cause them to migrate and thus affect their final orbital periods. We suggest that the connection between planets and disks may be deeper and involve a symbiotic…
We present an analysis of the positions and ages of young star clusters in eight local galaxies to investigate the connection between the age difference and separation of cluster pairs. We find that star clusters do not form uniformly but…
Planetary systems appear to form contemporaneously around young stars within young star-forming regions. Within these environments, the chances of survival, as well as the long-term evolution of these systems, are influenced by factors such…
More than 50 years have elapsed since the first studies of star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds. The wealth of data accumulated since then has not only revealed a large cluster system, but also a diversified one, filling loci in the age,…
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…
I present a brief review of the stellar population properties of massive galaxies, focusing on early-type galaxies in particular, with emphasis on recent results from the ATLAS3D Survey. I discuss the occurrence of young stellar ages, cold…
It has recently been shown that stellar clustering plays an important role in shaping the properties of planetary systems. We investigate how the multiplicity distributions and orbital periods of planetary systems depend on the 6D phase…
With the discovery of hundreds of exoplanets and a potentially huge number of Earth-like planets waiting to be discovered, the conditions for their habitability have become a focal point in exoplanetary research. The classical picture of…
Galaxy evolution is driven by many complex interrelated processes as galaxies accrete gas, form new stars, grow their stellar masses and central black holes, and subsequently quench. The processes that drive these transformations is poorly…
Galactic nuclei often harbor a disproportionately large amount of star formation activity with respect to their surrounding disks. Not coincidentally, the density of molecular material in galactic nuclei is often also much greater than that…
We use N-body integration to follow the evolution of clusters of 200 binary systems with different initial half mass radii $R_{0.5}$. We also simulate single-star clusters. All clusters evolve according to the same $n(t)$ curve, where…
The stars that populate the solar neighbourhood were formed in stellar clusters. Through N-body simulations of these clusters, we measure the rate of close encounters between stars. By monitoring the interaction histories of each star, we…
The currently available empirical evidence on the star formation processes in the extreme, high-pressure environments induced by galaxy encounters, mostly based on high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope imaging observations, strongly…
Differences in the stellar populations of galaxies can be used to quantify the effect of environment on the star formation history. We target a sample of early-type galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in two different environmental…
(abridged) The old Star Cluster (SC) systems surrounding any sofar investigated galaxy represent a powerful tool for the understanding of the cosmological evolution of their host galaxies. Phases of enhanced cluster formation can be…
Circumstellar disks are the sites of planet formation, and the very high incidence of extrasolar planets implies that most of them actually form planetary systems. Studying the structure and evolution of protoplanetary disks can thus place…
Planet formation remains a fundamentally important yet poorly understood process. Protoplanetary disks, the birthplaces of planetary systems, exhibit a wide range of substructures that are increasingly interpreted as signatures of…
Understanding the collapse of clouds and the formation of protoplanetary disks is essential to understanding the formation of stars and planets. Infall and accretion, the mass-aggregation processes that occur at envelope and disk scales,…