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Knowledge of the composition of material that will form planets is crucial to understand planetary diversity and the occurrence of potentially habitable planets. Ultimately, it is the chemistry in circumstellar disks that determines the…
Nature's many varied complex systems (including galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society) are islands of order within the increasingly disordered universe. All organized systems are subject to physical, biological or cultural evolution,…
Protoplanetary disks are dust-rich structures around young stars. The crystalline and amorphous materials contained within these disks are variably thermally processed and accreted to make bodies of a wide range of sizes and compositions,…
Water photolysis and hydrogen loss from the upper atmospheres of terrestrial planets is of fundamental importance to climate evolution but remains poorly understood in general. Here we present a range of calculations we performed to study…
Earth's volatile elements (H, C, and N) are essential to maintaining habitable conditions for metazoans and simpler life forms. However, identifying the sources (comets, meteorites, and trapped nebular gas) that supplied volatiles to Earth…
Aims. To understand the roles of infall and protostellar evolution on the envelopes of massive young stellar objects (YSOs). Methods. The chemical evolution of gas and dust is traced, including infall and realistic source evolution. The…
The hypothesis of quantization of masses of the solar system planets is considered. It is supposed that the solar system was bearing during the Protosun squeezing from the red giant to a yellow dwarf. According to mass and orbit…
The abundances of elements in the Earth and the terrestrial planets provide the initial conditions for life and clues as to the history and formation of the Solar System. We follow the pioneering work of Bond et al. (2010) and combine…
Life can be viewed as a localized chemical system that sits on, or in the basin of attraction of, a metastable dynamical attractor state that remains out of equilibrium with the environment. Such a view of life allows that new living states…
Understanding the set of conditions that allow rocky planets to have liquid water on their surface -- in the form of lakes, seas or oceans -- is a major scientific step to determine the fraction of planets potentially suitable for the…
Models of planet formation are mainly focused on the accretion and dynamical processes of the planets, neglecting their chemical composition. In this work, we calculate the condensation sequence of the different chemical elements for a…
Earth is expected to have acquired a reduced proto-atmosphere enriched in H2 and CH4 through the accretion of building blocks that contain metallic Fe and/or the gravitational trapping of surrounding nebula gas. Such an early, wet, reduced…
Well before the existence of exo-solar systems was confirmed, it was accepted knowledge that most -- if not all -- stars possess circumstellar material during the first one-to-several million years of their pre-main sequence lives, and thus…
Thousands of confirmed and candidate exoplanets have been identified in recent years. Consequently, theoretical research on the formation and dynamical evolution of planetary systems has seen a boost, and the processes of planet-planet…
Observations made using large ground-based and space-borne telescopes have probed cosmic history all the way from the present-day to a time when the Universe was less than a tenth of its present age. Earlier on lies the remaining frontier,…
Liquid water is a critical component of habitability. However, the production and stability of surficial liquid water can be challenging on planets outside the Habitable Zone and devoid of adequate greenhouse warming. On such cold, icy…
Geochemical and astronomical evidence demonstrate that planet formation occurred in two spatially and temporally separated reservoirs. The origin of this dichotomy is unknown. We use numerical models to investigate how the evolution of the…
The existence of intelligent, interstellar traveling and colonising life is a key assumption behind the Fermi Paradox. Until recently, detecting signs of life elsewhere has been so technically challenging as to seem almost impossible.…
Meteorites are a remarkable resource. They capture the imagination of people worldwide with their spectacular entry through Earth's atmosphere as fireballs, and their exotic character of being pieces of other worlds. Scientifically, they…
The isotopic compositions of terrestrial hydrogen and nitrogen are clearly different from those of the nebular gas from which the solar system formed, and also differ from most of cometary values. Terrestrial N and H isotopic compositions…