Related papers: The origin of free-floating objects in the Galaxy
The discovery of planetary systems beyond our solar system has challenged established theories of planetary formation. Planetary orbits display a variety of unexpected architectures, and free-floating planets appear ubiquitous. The recent…
Globulettes are small (radii $< 10$ kAU) dark dust clouds, seen against the background of bright nebulae. A majority of the objects have planetary mass. These objects may be a source of brown dwarfs and free floating planetary mass objects…
A planet is an end product of disk accretion around a primary star or substar. I quantify this definition by the degree to which a body dominates the other masses that share its orbital zone. Theoretical and observational measures of…
A population of free-floating planets is known from gravitational microlensing surveys. None have a directly measured mass, owing to a degeneracy with the distance, but the population statistics indicate that many are less massive than…
Our galaxy is full with planets. We now know that planets and planetary systems are diverse and come with different sizes, masses and compositions, as well as various orbital architectures. Although there has been great progress in…
Recent detections of extremely short-timescale microlensing events imply the existence of a large population of Earth- to Neptune-mass planets that appear to have no host stars. However, it is currently unknown whether these objects are…
Extensive photometric stellar surveys show that many main sequence stars show emission at infrared and longer wavelengths that is in excess of the stellar photosphere; this emission is thought to arise from circumstellar dust. The presence…
Accumulation of dust and ice particles into planetesimals is an important step in the planet formation process. Planetesimals are the seeds of both terrestrial planets and the solid cores of gas and ice giants forming by core accretion.…
In recent years several planets have been discovered at wide orbits (>100 AU) around their host stars. Theoretical studies encounter difficulties in explaining their formation and origin. Here we propose a novel scenario for the production…
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…
Among the methods proposed to detect extrasolar planets, microlensing is the only technique that can detect free-floating planets. Free-floating planets are detected through the channel of short-duration isolated lensing events. However, if…
The ejection of planets by the instability of planetary systems is a potential source of free-floating planets. We numerically simulate multi-planet systems to study the evolution process, the properties of surviving systems, and the…
Recent ground-based microlensing surveys suggest that our Galaxy may abound with small free floating planets, potentially up to $\sim$21 such planets per star. We explore the implication of such possibility on the mass budget for planet…
Planetary nebulae are formed by the matter ejected by low-to-intermediate mass stars (~0.8-8 times the mass of the Sun) towards the end of their lives. As hydrogen and then helium fuel sources run out, stars expand. During these giant…
Motivated by recent measurements of the free-floating planet mass function at terrestrial masses, we consider the possibility that the solar system may have captured a terrestrial planet early in its history. We show that $\sim 1.2$…
Free-floating planets comprise one of the most enigmatic populations of exoplanets in the Galaxy. Though ground-based observations point to a large abundance of these worlds, little is known about their origins and demographics. In the…
Planetary systems have their origin in the gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. Through a process of accretion, is formed a massive star and a disk of planetesimals orbiting the star. Using a formalism analogous to quantum…
All the four giant planets in our Solar System have rings, but their characteristics are very different. The rings consist of a number of small particles, although individual particles have not been directly imaged. Near the central planet,…
Since 2017, two macroscopic interstellar objects have been discovered in the inner Solar System, both of which are distinct in nature. The first interstellar object, 1I/`Oumuamua, passed within $\sim63$ lunar distances of the Earth,…
Multiple studies have shown that planet-planet scattering plays an important role in the dynamical evolution of planetary systems. For instance, it has been shown that planet-planet scattering can reproduce the eccentricity distribution of…