Related papers: NICMOS Imaging of Candidate Extra-Solar Planetary …
Astronomy is at times a science of unexpected discovery. When it is, and if we are lucky, new intellectual territories emerge to challenge our views of the cosmos. The recent indirect detections using high-precision Doppler spectroscopy of…
The study of planets beyond the solar system and the search for other habitable planets and life is just beginning. Ground-based (radial velocity and transits) and space-based surveys (transits and astrometry) will identify planets spanning…
To understand the formation of planetary systems, one needs to understand the initial conditions of planet formation, i.e. the young gas-rich planet forming disks. Spatially resolved high-contrast observations are of particular interest,…
Debris disks are intimately linked to planetary system evolution since the rocky material surrounding the host stars is due to secondary generation from the collisions of planetesimals. With the conclusion and lack of future large scale…
Planet formation remains a fundamentally important yet poorly understood process. Protoplanetary disks, the birthplaces of planetary systems, exhibit a wide range of substructures that are increasingly interpreted as signatures of…
MATISSE represents a great opportunity to image the environment around massive and evolved stars. This will allow one to put constraints on the circumstellar structure, on the mass ejection of dust and its reorganization , and on the…
Radially extended disk winds could be the key to unlocking how protoplanetary disks accrete and how planets form and migrate. A distinctive characteristic is their nested morphology of velocity and chemistry. Here we report JWST/NIRSpec…
We provide an overview of the Spitzer Legacy Program ``Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems" (FEPS) which was proposed in 2000, begun in 2001, and executed aboard the Spitzer Space Telescope between 2003 and 2006. This program…
In the last few years, the so-called "Nice model" has got a significant importance in the study of the formation and evolution of the solar system. According to this model, the initial orbital configuration of the giant planets was much…
Directly imaging extrasolar planets using a monolithic optical telescope avoids many pitfalls of space interferometry and opens up the prospect of visible light studies of extrasolar planetary systems. Future astronomical missions may…
Many massive objects have been found in the outer region of the Solar system. How they were formed and evolved has not been well understood, although there have been intensive studies on accretion process of terrestrial planets. One of the…
Extrasolar debris disks are the dust disks found around nearby main sequence stars arising from the break-up of asteroids and comets orbiting the stars. Far-IR surveys (e.g., with Herschel) showed that ~20% of stars host detectable dust…
The discovery of planets orbiting at less than 1 au from their host star and less massive than Saturn in various exoplanetary systems revolutionized our theories of planetary formation. The fundamental question is whether these close-in…
We present 3-160 micron photometry obtained with the IRAC and MIPS instruments for the first five targets from the Spitzer Legacy Science Program "Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems" and 4-35 micron spectro-photometry obtained…
We have carried out a deep infrared imaging survey (1.1um and 1.6um) of the Hubble Deep Field North (HDF-N) using NICMOS on board the Hubble Space Telescope. The combined WFPC2+NICMOS data set lets us study galaxy morphologies, colors and…
Started approximately in the late 1980s, exoplanetology has up to now unveiled the main gross bulk characteristics of planets and planetary systems. In the future it will benefit from more and more large telescopes and advanced space…
We present models for the formation of terrestrial planets, and the collisional evolution of debris disks, in planetary systems that contain multiple unstable gas giants. We previously showed that the dynamics of the giant planets…
A survey of currently known planet-hosting stars indicates that approximately 25% of extrasolar planetary systems are within dual-star environments. Several of these systems contain stellar companions on moderately close orbits, implying…
Understanding planetesimal formation is an essential first step to understanding planet formation. The distribution of these first solid bodies will drive the locations where planetary embryos can grow. We seek to understand the parameter…
Near-infrared imaging surveys of high-mass star-forming regions reveal an amazingly complex interplay between star formation and the environment (Churchwell et al. 2006; Alvarez et al. 2004). By means of near-IR spectroscopy the embedded…