Related papers: Formation of Giant Planets
Despite the revolution in our knowledge resulting from the detection of planets around mature stars, we know almost nothing about planets orbiting young stars because rapid rotation and active photospheres preclude detection by radial…
We hypothesise that planets are made by tidal downsizing of migrating giant planet embryos. The proposed scheme for planet formation consists of these steps: (i) a massive young protoplanetary disc fragments at R ~ several tens to hundreds…
We review the state of the field of terrestrial planet formation with the goal of understanding the formation of the inner Solar System and low-mass exoplanets. We review the dynamics and timescales of accretion from planetesimals to…
The initial conditions, physics, and outcome of planet formation are now constrained by detailed observations of protoplanetary disks, laboratory experiments, and the discovery of thousands of extrasolar planetary systems. These…
The hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered in the past two decades offer a new perspective on planetary structure. Instead of being the archetypal examples of planets, those of our Solar System are merely possible outcomes of…
We compare the planet-to-star mass-ratio distribution measured by gravitational microlensing to core accretion theory predictions from population synthesis models. The core accretion theory's runaway gas accretion process predicts a dearth…
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…
In the hot-start core accretion formation model for gas giants, the interior of a planet is usually assumed to be fully convective. By calculating the detailed internal evolution of a planet assuming hot start outer boundary conditions, we…
We have investigated the problem of the distribution of both masses and orbital radii of planets resulting from the gas-accretion, gas-capture model. First we followed the evolution of gas and solids from the moment where all solids are in…
Statistical analyses from exoplanet surveys around low-mass stars indicate that super-Earth and Neptune-mass planets are more frequent than gas giants around such stars, in agreement with core accretion theory of planet formation. Using…
In this paper we investigate the formation of Uranus and Neptune, according to the core-nucleated accretion model, considering formation locations ranging from 12 to 30 AU from the Sun, and with various disk solid-surface densities and core…
The recent discoveries of massive planets on ultra-wide orbits of HR 8799 (Marois et al. 2008) and Fomalhaut (Kalas et al. 2008) present a new challenge for planet formation theorists. Our goal is to figure out which of three giant planet…
With the increasing number of detected exoplanet samples, the statistical properties of planetary systems have become much clearer. In this review, we summarize the major statistics that have been revealed mainly by radial velocity and…
The formation of planets is one of the major unsolved problems in modern astrophysics. Planets are believed to form out of the material in circumstellar disks known to exist around young stars, and which are a by-product of the star…
In the standard model of gas giant planet formation, a large solid core (~ 10 times the Earth's mass) forms first, then accretes its massive envelope (100 or more Earth masses) of gas. However, inward planet migration due to gravitational…
Spurred by the discovery of numerous exoplanets in multiple systems, binaries have become in recent years one of the main topics in planet formation research. Numerous studies have investigated to what extent the presence of a stellar…
We calculate the formation of dust clouds in atmospheres of giant gas-planets. The chemical structure and the evolution of the grain size distribution in the dust cloud layer is discussed based on a consistent treatment of seed formation,…
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…
Gas-giant exoplanets are test cases for theories of planet formation as their atmospheres are proposed to carry signatures of their formation within the protoplanetary disk. The metallicity and C/O are key diagnostics, allowing to…
This paper reviews the dynamics of the growth of solid particles from micron-sized dust grains to planets in protostellar accretion disks. The formation and orbital evolution of giant protoplanets is also discussed.