Related papers: A universal brown dwarf desert formed between plan…
The orbital eccentricity-radius relation for small planets is indicative of the predominant dynamical sculpting processes during late-stage orbital evolution. Previous studies have shown that planets orbiting Sun-like stars exhibit an…
Doppler-based planet surveys have discovered numerous giant planets but are incomplete beyond several AU. At larger star-planet separations, direct planet detection through high-contrast imaging has proven successful, but this technique is…
In its all-sky survey, Gaia will monitor astrometrically and photometrically millions of main-sequence stars with sufficient sensitivity to brown dwarf companions within a few AUs from their host stars and to transiting brown dwarfs on very…
The discovery of large numbers of young low-mass stars and brown dwarfs over the last decade has made it possible to investigate star formation and early evolution in a previously unexplored mass regime. In this review, we begin by…
Hundreds of brown dwarfs (BDs) have been discovered in the last few years in stellar clusters and among field stars. BDs are almost as numerous as hydrogen burning stars and so a theory of star formation should also explain their origin.…
Cold Jovian planets play an important role in sculpting the dynamical environment in which inner terrestrial planets form. The core accretion model predicts that giant planets cannot form around low-mass M dwarfs, although this idea has…
The mass domain where massive extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs lay is still poorly understood. Indeed, not even a clear dividing line between massive planets and brown dwarfs has been established yet. This is partly due to the paucity of…
The co-planarity of solar-system planets led Kant to suggest that they formed from an accretion disk, and the discovery of hundreds of such disks around young stars as well as hundreds of co-planar planetary systems by the Kepler satellite…
The onset of planet formation in protoplanetary disks is marked by the growth and crystallization of sub-micron-sized dust grains accompanied by dust settling toward the disk mid-plane. Here we present infrared spectra of disks around brown…
We suggest that low-mass hydrogen-burning stars like the Sun should sometimes form with massive extended discs; and we show, by means of radiation hydrodynamic simulations, that the outer parts of such discs (R>100 AU) are likely to…
Astrophysical objects below the stellar mass limit but well above the mass of Jupiter eluded discovery for nearly three decades after Kumar first proposed their existence, and for two decades after Tarter proposed the name "brown dwarfs."…
Context. Many efforts are being made to characterize extrasolar planetary systems and unveil the fundamental mechanisms of planet formation. An important aspect of the problem, which remains largely unknown, is to understand how the planet…
Brown dwarfs form the key, yet poorly understood, link between stellar and planetary astrophysics. These objects offer unique tests of Galactic structure, but observational limitations have inhibited their large-scale analysis to date.…
The commonality of collisionally replenished debris around main sequence stars suggests that minor bodies are frequent around Sun-like stars. Whether or not debris disks in general are accompanied by planets is yet unknown, but debris disks…
How frequent are brown dwarf binaries? Do brown dwarfs have planets? Are current theoretical pre-main-sequence evolutionary tracks valid down to the substellar regime? - Any detection of a companion to a brown dwarf takes us one step…
Analyses of exoplanet statistics suggest a trend of giant planet occurrence with host star mass, a clue to how planets like Jupiter form. One missing piece of the puzzle is the occurrence around late K dwarf stars (masses of 0.5-0.75Msun…
The bulk-metallicity determination of giant exoplanets is essential to constrain their formation and evolution pathways and to compare them to the solar system. Previous studies inferred an inverse relation between the mass and bulk…
We present the results of multiple simulations of open clusters, modelling the dynamics of a population of brown dwarf members. We consider the effects of a large range of primordial binary populations, including the possibilities of having…
We present a rotational velocity (vsini) survey of 32 stellar/substellar objects and giant planets using Keck/KPIC high-resolution spectroscopy, including 6 giant planets (2-7 M$_\mathrm{Jup}$) and 25 substellar/stellar companions (12-88…
In recent years there have been many attempts to characterize the occurrence of stellar, BD and planetary-mass companions to solar-type stars, with the aim of constraining formation mechanisms. From RV observations a dearth of companions…