Related papers: The origin of free-floating objects in the Galaxy
Free-floating planets are a new class of planets recently discovered. These planets don't orbit within stellar systems, instead living a nomadic life within the galaxy. How such objects formed remains elusive. Numerous works have explored…
Most young low-mass stars are born as binary systems, and circumstellar disks have recently been observed around the individual components of proto-binary systems (e.g. L1551-IRS5). Thus planets and planetary systems are likely to form…
Planets are thought to form via accretion from a remnant disk of gas and solids around a newly formed star. During this process material in the disk either remains bound to the star as part of either a planet, a smaller celestial body, or…
Microlensing surveys suggest the presence of a surprisingly large population of free-floating planets, with a rate of about two Neptunes per star. The origin of such objects is not known, neither do we know if they are truly unbound or are…
We find that free-floating planets can remain bound to a star cluster for much longer than was previously assumed: of the order of the cluster half-mass relaxation timescale as opposed to the crossing-time. This result is based on N-body…
The origin of planetary mass objects (PMOs) wandering in young star clusters remains enigmatic, especially when they come in pairs. They could represent the lowest-mass object formed via molecular cloud collapse or high-mass planets ejected…
Recent gravitational microlensing observations predict a vast population of free-floating giant planets that outnumbers main sequence stars almost twofold. A frequently-invoked mechanism for generating this population is a dynamical…
Free-floating planets (FFPs) are the lightest products of star formation and they carry important information on the initial conditions of the environment in which they were formed. They were first discovered in the 2000s but still few of…
The dominant mechanism for generating free-floating planets has so far remained elusive. One suggested mechanism is that planets are ejected from planetary systems due to planet-planet interactions. However, instability around a single star…
The recent discovery of free-floating planets and their theoretical interpretation as celestial bodies, either condensed independently or ejected from parent stars in tight clusters, introduced an intriguing possibility. Namely, that some…
We have simulated encounters between planetary systems and single stars in various clustered environments. This allows us to estimate the fraction of systems liberated, the velocity distribution of the liberated planets, and the separation…
Evidence of exoplanets with orbits that are misaligned with the spin of the host star may suggest that not all bound planets were born in the protoplanetary disk of their current planetary system. Observations have shown that free-floating…
During the formation of our solar system, a large number of planetesimals were ejected into interstellar space by gravitational encounters with the planets. Debris disks observations and numerical simulations indicate that many other…
Planets are built from planetesimals: solids larger than a kilometer which grow by colliding pairwise. Planetesimals themselves are unlikely to form by two-body collisions; sub-km objects have gravitational fields individually too weak, and…
"Free-floating, non-deuterium-burning, substellar objects" are isolated bodies of a few Jupiter masses found in very young open clusters and associations, nearby young moving groups and in the immediate vicinity of the Sun. They are neither…
Genomic complexity can be used as a clock with which the moment in which life originated can be measured. Some authors who have studied this problem have come to the conclusion that it is not possible that terrestrial life originated here…
A free-floating planet is a planetary-mass object that orbits around a non-stellar massive object (e.g. a brown dwarf) or around the Galactic Center. The presence of exomoons orbiting free-floating planets has been theoretically predicted…
Stars and planets are the fundamental objects of the Universe. Their formation processes, though related, may differ in important ways. Stars almost certainly form from gravitational collapse and probably have formed this way since the…
Planets are common objects in the Universe, observationally as well as theoretically. However, the standard theory of their formation encounters many difficulties, such as dust fall and disk lifetime problems. We positively analyze them,…
The nature and origin of free-floating planets (FFPs) are still largely unconstrained because of a lack of large homogeneous samples to enable a statistical analysis of their properties. So far, most FFPs have been discovered using indirect…