Related papers: NICMOS Imaging of Candidate Extra-Solar Planetary …
As astronomers, we are living an exciting time for what concerns the search for other worlds. Recent discoveries have already deeply impacted our vision of planetary formation and architectures. Future bio-signature discoveries will…
Debris disks are the dust disks found around ~20% of nearby main sequence stars in far-IR surveys. They can be considered as descendants of protoplanetary disks or components of planetary systems, providing valuable information on…
We characterize the first 40 Myr of evolution of circumstellar disks through a unified study of the infrared properties of members of young clusters and associations with ages from 2 Myr up to ~ 40 Myr: NGC 1333, NGC 1960, NGC 2232, NGC…
Dusty debris disks around pre- and main-sequence stars are potential signposts for the existence of planetesimals and exoplanets. Giant planet formation is therefore expected to play a key role in the evolution of the disk. This is…
Practically all known planet hosts will evolve into white dwarfs, and large parts of their planetary systems will survive this transition - the same is true for the solar system beyond the orbit of Mars. Spectroscopy of white dwarfs…
Debris discs are a consequence of the planet formation process and constitute the fingerprints of planetesimal systems. Their solar system's counterparts are the asteroid and Edgeworth-Kuiper belts. The DUNES survey aims at detecting…
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…
Circumstellar disks of planetary debris are now known or suspected to closely orbit hundreds of white dwarf stars. To date, both data and theory support disks that are entirely contained within the preceding giant stellar radii, and hence…
We examine the accretion of cores of giant planets from planetesimals, gas accretion onto the cores, and their orbital migration. We adopt a working model for nascent protostellar disks with a wide variety of surface density distributions…
The growing body of observational data on extrasolar planets and protoplanetary disks has stimulated intense research on planet formation and evolution in the past few years. The extremely diverse, sometimes unexpected physical and orbital…
Almost every known planet host will evolve into a white dwarf, and the surviving planetary material will continue to orbit this stellar remnant. Asteroids perturbed onto star-grazing orbits will become disrupted, forming an accretion disk…
Theories of planet formation predict the birth of giant planets in the inner, dense, and gas-rich regions of the circumstellar disks around young stars. These are the regions from which strong CO emission is expected. Observations have so…
The process that leads to the formation and early evolution of low-mass stars is in a broad sense well understood theoretically and carefully traced observationally. The largest uncertainties in this framework reside in the poorly known…
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…
High-contrast adaptive optics imaging is a powerful technique to probe the architectures of planetary systems from the outside-in and survey the atmospheres of self-luminous giant planets. Direct imaging has rapidly matured over the past…
We develop a simple model of planetary formation, focusing our attention on those planets with masses less than 10 Earth masses and studying particularly the primordial spin parameters of planets resulting from the accretion of…
This paper uses observations of dusty debris discs, including a growing number of gas detections in these systems, to test our understanding of the origin and evolution of this gaseous component. It is assumed that all debris discs with icy…
One of the most surprising discoveries of extrasolar planets is the detection of planets in moderately close binary star systems. The Jovian-type planets in the two binaries of Gamma Cephei and GJ 86 have brought to the forefront questions…
When directly imaging a cold giant exoplanet hosting a ring system, the reflected light from the rings can outshine the planet's thermal emission and reflected-light in the near-infrared. Consequently, an exoring may be detectable at a…
We present the results of planet formation N-body simulations based on a comprehensive physical model that includes planetary mass growth through mutual embryo collisions and planetesimal/boulder accretion, viscous disc evolution, planetary…