Related papers: Large planets may not form fractionally large moon…
Exoplanet discoveries have motivated numerous efforts to find unseen populations of exomoons, yet they have been unsuccessful. A plausible explanation is that most discovered planets are located on close-in orbits, which would make their…
The terrestrial planets are believed to have formed by violent collisions of tens of lunar- to Mars-size protoplanets at time t<200 Myr after the protoplanetary gas disk dispersal (t_0). The solar system giant planets rapidly formed during…
The leading theory for the origin of the Moon is the giant impact hypothesis, in which the Moon was formed out of the debris left over from the collision of a Mars-sized body with the Earth. Soon after its formation, the orbit of the Moon…
The formation of gas giant planets must occur during the first few Myr of a star's lifetime, when the protoplanetary disc still contains sufficient gas to be accreted onto the planetary core. The majority of protoplanetary discs are exposed…
Understanding the Moon's formation mechanism is necessary for studying not only the Moon itself, but also the evolution, formation, habitability, and structure of other planets and the moons in the Solar system and in extrasolar planetary…
The hypothesis of lunar origin by a single giant impact can explain some aspects of the Earth-Moon system. However, it is difficult to reconcile giant impact models with the compositional similarity of the Earth and Moon without violating…
We show that interaction with a gas disk may produce young planetary systems with closely-spaced orbits, stabilized by mean-motion resonances between neighbors. On longer timescales, after the gas is gone, interaction with a remnant…
We reconsider the commonly held assumption that warm debris disks are tracers of terrestrial planet formation. The high occurrence rate inferred for Earth-mass planets around mature solar-type stars based on exoplanet surveys (roughly 20%)…
Planet-planet scattering is the leading mechanism to explain the broad eccentricity distribution of observed giant exoplanets. Here we study the orbital stability of primordial giant planet moons in this scenario. We use N-body simulations…
The origin of Mars's small moons, Phobos and Deimos, remains unknown. They are typically thought either to be captured asteroids or to have accreted from a debris disk produced by a giant impact. Here, we present an alternative scenario…
I discuss the role that disc fragmentation plays in the formation of gas giant and terrestrial planets, and how this relates to the formation of brown dwarfs and low-mass stars, and ultimately to the process of star formation. Protostellar…
The classical scenario of terrestrial planet formation is characterized by a phase of giant impacts among Moon-to-Mars mass planetary embryos. While the classic model and its adaptations have produced adequate analogs of the outer three…
The Moon is generally thought to have formed from the debris ejected by the impact of a planet-sized object with the proto-Earth towards the end of planetary accretion. Modeling of the impact process predicts that the lunar material was…
The apparent regularity of the motion of the giant planets of our solar system suggested for decades that said planets formed onto orbits similar to the current ones and that nothing dramatic ever happened during their lifetime. The…
Giant planets are tens to thousands of times as massive as the Earth, and many times as large. Most of their volumes are occupied by hydrogen and helium, the primary constituents of the protostellar disks from which they formed.…
Much of a planet's composition could be determined right at the onset of formation. Laboratory experiments can constrain these early steps. This includes static tensile strength measurements or collisions carried out under Earth's gravity…
Giant planets dominate the mass of many planetary systems, including the Solar System, and represent the best-characterized class of extrasolar planets. Understanding the formation of giant planets bridges the high mass end of the planet…
Direct imaging observations of planets revealed that wide-orbit ($>10$ au) giant planets exist even around subsolar-metallicity host stars and do not require metal-rich environments for their formation. A possible formation mechanism of…
The evolution of gravitationally unstable protoplanetary gaseous disks has been studied with the use of three-dimensional smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations with unprecedented resolution. We have considered disks with initial…
Photosynthesis offers a convenient means of sustaining biospheres. We quantify the constraints for photosynthesis to be functional on the permanent nightside of tidally locked rocky exoplanets via reflected light from their exomoons. We…