Related papers: Giant Impacts and Debris Disk Morphology
Context. The bipolar outflows associated with low-mass protostars create cavities in the infalling envelope. These cavities are illuminated by the central protostar and inner disk, creating a bipolar scattered light nebula at near-infrared…
This paper is the first part in our series on the influence of tidal interactions and minor mergers on the radial and vertical disk structure of spiral galaxies. We report on the sample selection, our observations, and data reduction.…
We analyse the phase-space structure of simulated thick discs that are the result of a significant merger between a disc galaxy and a satellite. Our main goal is to establish what would be the characteristic imprints of a merger origin for…
We present observations of the HD 15115 debris disk from ALMA at 1.3 mm that capture this intriguing system with the highest resolution ($0.\!\!^{\prime\prime}6$ or $29$ AU) at millimeter wavelengths to date. This new ALMA image shows…
Massive bodies undergo orbital eccentricity oscillations when embedded in an axisymmetric disk of smaller mass orbits. These eccentricity oscillations are driven by secular torques that seek to equalize the apsidal precession rates of all…
The projected kinematical properties of unequal-mass merger remnants of disk galaxies are analysed and shown to agree well with observations of disky, fast rotating elliptical galaxies. This supports the major merger hypothesis of…
In recent years, it has been demonstrated that massive stars see their infant circumstellar medium shaped into a large, irradiated, gravitationally unstable accretion disc during their early formation phase. Such discs constitute the gas…
We quantitatively investigate how collisional avalanches may developin debris discs as the result of the initial break-up of a planetesimal or comet-like object, triggering a collisional chain reaction due to outward escaping small dust…
Protoplanetary disks observed edge-on commonly show asymmetries that can be caused by shadows cast from a warp. With the growing amount of these observations, methods to constrain warp parameters are urgently needed. In this work, we…
Using VLT/SPHERE near-infrared dual-band imaging and integral field spectroscopy we discovered an edge-on debris disk around the 17\,Myr old A-type member of the Scorpius-Centaurus OB association HD 110058. The edge-on disk can be traced to…
Debris discs are analogues to our own Kuiper belt around main-sequence stars and are therefore referred to as exoKuiper belts. They have been resolved at high angular resolution at wavelengths spanning the optical to the…
Quasar microlensing effects make it possible to measure the accretion disc sizes around distant supermassive black holes that are still well beyond the spatial resolution of contemporary instrumentation. The sizes measured with this…
Young giant planets, which are embedded in a circumstellar disk, will significantly perturb the disk density distribution. This effect can potentially be used as an indirect tracer for planets. We investigate the feasibility of observing…
Dense stellar environments as hosts of ongoing star formation increase the probability of gravitational encounters among stellar systems during the early stages of evolution. Stellar interaction may occur through non-recurring, hyperbolic…
Gravitational scattering between massive planets has been invoked to explain the eccentricity distribution of extrasolar planets. For scattering to occur, the planets must either form in -- or migrate into -- an unstable configuration. In…
When the gravitational lensing potential can be approximated by that of circularly symmetric system affected by weak perturbations, it is found that the shape of the resulting (tangential) caustics is entirely specified by the local…
Strong lensing by intervening galaxies can produce multiple images of gravitational waves from sources at cosmological distances. These images acquire additional phase-shifts as the over-focused wavefront passes through itself along the…
Detectable debris discs are thought to require dynamical excitation (`stirring'), so that planetesimal collisions release large quantities of dust. We investigate the effects of the secular perturbations of a planet, which may lie at a…
We study the linear perturbations of collisionless near-Keplerian discs. Such systems are models for debris discs around stars and the stellar discs surrounding supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies. Using a finite-element…
Debris disks are the natural by-products of the planet formation process. Scattered or polarized light observations are mostly sensitive to small dust grains that are released from the grinding down of bigger planetesimals. High angular…