Related papers: Was the Solar System's dynamical instability trigg…
Giant planet migration appears widespread among planetary systems in our Galaxy. However, the timescales of this process, which reflect the underlying dynamical mechanisms, are not well constrained, even within the solar system. Since…
Close planetary flybys are frequently employed as a technique to place spacecraft on extreme solar system trajectories that would otherwise require much larger booster vehicles or may not even be feasible when relying solely on chemical…
We know that planetary systems are just as common around white dwarfs as around main sequence stars. However, self-consistently linking a planetary system across these two phases of stellar evolution through the violent giant branch poses…
Placing the architecture of the Solar System within the broader context of planetary architectures is one of the primary topics of interest within planetary science. Exoplanet discoveries have revealed a large range of system architectures,…
Recent work has demonstrated that exoplanetary system properties correlate strongly with ambient stellar clustering in six-dimensional stellar position-velocity phase space, quantified by dividing planetary systems into sub-samples with…
We explore the potential multistability of the climate for a planet around the habitable zone. We focus on conditions reminiscent to those of the Earth system, but our investigation aims at presenting a general methodology for dealing with…
We present a comprehensive characterisation of close stellar encounters in the solar vicinity, with a particular focus on placing the predicted fly-by of GJ~710 in context. This star will come extremely close ($0.0621$\,pc or…
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…
A large fraction of stars are formed in dense clusters. In the cluster, close encounters between stars at distances less than 100 au are common. It has been shown that during close encounters planets can transfer between stars. Such…
The presence and abundance of the short-lived radioisotopes (SLRs) $^{26}$Al and $^{60}$Fe during the formation of the Solar System is difficult to explain unless the Sun formed in the vicinity of one or more massive star(s) that exploded…
Planet formation simulations consistently predict compact systems of numerous small planets in chains of mean motion resonances formed by planet-disk interaction, but transiting planet surveys have found most systems to be non-resonant and…
We review the role of stellar flybys and encounters in shaping planet-forming discs around young stars, based on the published literature on this topic in the last 30 years. Since most stars $\leq~2$ Myr old harbour protoplanetary discs,…
With $n$-body simulations we investigate the stability of tilted circumbinary planetary systems consisting of two nonzero mass planets. The planets are initially in circular orbits that are coplanar to each other, as would be expected if…
The discovery of planets around PSR~1257+12 suggests that planetary systems may be detected around the recycled pulsars found in globular clusters. Planetary systems in dense clusters have lifetimes to disruption due to perturbations by…
Recent observations indicate that the progenitors of globular clusters (GCs) at high redshifts had high average stellar surface densities above $10^5\, \mathrm{M}_\odot\, \mathrm{pc}^{-2}$. The internal structure and kinematics of the…
Transit surveys have revealed a significant population of compact multi-planet systems, containing several sub-Neptune-mass planets on close-in, tightly-packed orbits. These systems are thought to have formed through a final phase of giant…
Disks of bodies orbiting a much more massive central object are extremely common in astrophysics. When the orbits comprising such disks are eccentric, we show they are susceptible to a new dynamical instability. Gravitational forces between…
We carry out N-body simulations to examine the effects of dynamical interactions on planetary systems in young open star clusters. We explore how the planetary populations in these star clusters evolve, and how this evolution depends on the…
It is thought that, sometime after their formation, the solar system's giant planets experienced a dynamical instability that caused their orbits to excite, diverge, and ejected one or more objects with masses comparable to the ice giants.…
The habitability of planets is strongly affected by impacts from comets and asteroids. Indications from the ages of Moon rocks suggest that the inner Solar System experienced an increased rate of impacts roughly 3.8 Gya known as the Late…