Related papers: NICMOS Imaging of Candidate Extra-Solar Planetary …
How do planetary systems, in general, and our own Solar System (SS), in particular, form? In conjunction, Astronomy and Isotope Cosmochemistry provide us with powerful tools to answer this age-old question. In this contribution, we review…
Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the community studying the effect of ultraviolet radiation environment, predominantly set by OB stars, on protoplanetary disc evolution and planet formation. This is important because a…
Most stars, perhaps even all stars, form in crowded stellar environments. Such star forming regions typically dissolve within ten million years, while others remain bound as stellar groupings for hundreds of millions to billions of years,…
It is now well established that a fraction of the massive (M>8 Msun) star population hosts strong, organised magnetic fields, most likely of fossil origin. The details of the generation and evolution of these fields are still poorly…
There are many competing theories and models describing the formation, migration and evolution of exoplanet systems. As both the precision with which we can characterize exoplanets and their host stars, and the number of systems for which…
The similar orbital distances and detection rates of debris disks and the prominent rings observed in protoplanetary disks suggest a potential connection between these structures. We explore this connection with new calculations that follow…
The past decade has seen major progress in our understanding of terrestrial planet formation. Yet key questions remain. In this review we first address the growth of 100 km-scale planetesimals as a consequence of dust coagulation and…
One of the promising methods to search for life on extra-solar planets (exoplanets) is to detect life's signatures in their atmospheres. Spectra of exoplanet atmospheres at the modest resolution needed to search for oxygen, carbon dioxide,…
The intermediate phases of planet formation are not directly observable due to lack of emission from planetesimals. Planet formation is, however, a dynamically active process resulting in collisions between the evolving planetesimals and…
Super-Earths and sub-Neptunes represent the most common class of exoplanets discovered to date in our galaxy, yet they have no direct analogues in the Solar System. Since 2014, researchers within the NCCR PlanetS have made significant…
Direct imaging surveys have found that long-period super-Jupiters are rare. By contrast, recent modeling of the widespread gaps in protoplanetary disks revealed by ALMA suggests an abundant population of smaller Neptune to Jupiter-mass…
The dust disks observed around mature stars are evidence that plantesimals are present in these systems on spatial scales that are similar to that of the asteroids and the KBOs in the Solar System. These dust disks (a.k.a. ``debris disks'')…
The recent discoveries of giant planets around nearby stars have galvanized the planetary science community, astronomers, and the public at large. Since {\it direct} detection is now feasible, and is suggested by the recent acquisition of…
ESPI has been proposed for direct imaging and spectral analysis of giant planets orbiting solar-type stars. ESPI extends the concept suggested by Nisenson and Papaliolios (2001) for a square aperture apodized telescope that has sufficient…
The detection of exoplanets and accretion disks around newborn stars has spawned new ideas and models of how our Solar System formed and evolved. Meteorites as probes of geologic deep time can provide ground truth to these models. In…
The Rosetta mission and its exquisite measurements have revived the debate on whether comets are pristine planetesimals or collisionally evolved objects. We investigate the collisional evolution experienced by the precursors of current…
In order to understand the atmospheres as well as the formation mechanism of giant planets formed outside our solar system, the next decade will require an investment in studies of isolated young brown dwarfs. In this white paper we…
Since the 1990's, protoplanetary disks and planetary disks have been intensively observed from the optical to the millimetre wavelength and many models have been developed to investigate their gas and dust properties and dynamics. These…
The recent identification of several groups of young stars within 100 parsecs of the Sun has generated widespread interest. Given their proximity and possible age differences, these systems are ideally suited for detailed studies of disk…
Circumstellar debris disks are the extrasolar analogues of the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. They consist of comets and leftover planetesimals that continuously collide and produce circumstellar dust that can be observed as infrared…