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Quantification of the Galaxy's star formation history involves both the duration and the rate of formation, with these parameters being known with different precision for different populations. The early rate of star formation is knowable…
The canonical picture of star formation involves disk-mediated accretion, with Keplerian accretion disks and associated bipolar jets primarily observed in nearby, low-mass young stellar objects (YSOs). Recently, rotating gaseous structures…
The discovery of Sedna places new constraints on the origin and evolution of our solar system. Here we investigate the possibility that a close encounter with another star produced the observed edge of the Kuiper belt, at roughly 50 AU, and…
Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar System's Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is…
There are several observational campaigns under way to detect kilometer size foreground Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) through their occultation of background stars. The interpretation of an occultation light curve, unfortunately, is affected…
It is often assumed that the strong gravitational field of a super-massive black hole disrupts an adjacent molecular cloud preventing classical star formation in the deep potential well of the black hole. Yet, young stars have been observed…
We present results from the largest numerical simulation of star formation to resolve the fragmentation process down to the opacity limit. The simulation follows the collapse and fragmentation of a large-scale turbulent molecular cloud to…
For much of human history we have wondered how our solar system formed, and whether there are any other planets like ours around other stars. Only in the last 20 years have we had direct evidence for the existence of exoplanets, with the…
Stars and planets can be seen as the second fundamental building blocks of baryons in the universe (only second to the dust and gas in molecular clouds). Their formation involves dust grain growth of many orders of magnitude and a myriad of…
The goal of this investigation is to reconstruct the cosmic star formation rate density history from local observations and in doing so to gain insight into how galaxies might have formed and evolved. A new chemical evolution model is…
Batygin and Brown (2016) have suggested the existence of a new Solar System planet supposed to be responsible for the perturbation of eccentric orbits of small outer bodies. The main challenge is now to detect and characterize this putative…
The solar system was most likely born in a star cluster containing at least 1000 stars. It is highly probable that this cluster environment influenced various properties of the solar system like its chemical composition, size and the…
The formation and evolution of young star clusters and OB associations is fundamental to our understanding of the star formation process, the conditions faced by young binary and planetary systems, and the formation of long-lived open and…
Context: Current exoplanet formation studies tend to overlook the birth environment of stars in clustered environments. The effect of this environment on the planet-formation process, however, is important, especially in the earliest stage.…
The goal of planet formation as a field of study is not only to provide the understanding of how planets come into existence. It is also an interdisciplinary bridge which links astronomy to geology and mineralogy. Recent observations of…
The Kuiper Belt is a distant region of the Solar System. On 1 January 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft flew close to (486958) 2014 MU69, a Cold Classical Kuiper Belt Object, a class of objects that have never been heated by the Sun and are…
Central compact objects (CCOs) are thought to be young thermally emitting isolated neutron stars that were born during the preceding core-collapse supernova explosion. Here we present evidence that at least in one case the CCO could have…
This chapter reviews accretion models for Kuiper belt objects (KBOs), discussing in particular the compatibility of the observed properties of the KBO population with the streaming instability paradigm. Then it discusses how the dynamical…
Molecular clouds at very high latitudes ($b > 60^o$) away from the Galactic plane are considered rare and not conventional sites of star formation. Contrary to this, the recent discovery of high latitude embedded Clusters can possibly…
Star formation involves the flow of gas and dust within molecular clouds into protostars and young stellar objects (YSOs) due to gravity. Along the way, these flows are shaped significantly by many other mechanisms, including pressure,…