Related papers: NICMOS Imaging of Candidate Extra-Solar Planetary …
The discovery of over 400 extrasolar planets allows us to statistically test our understanding of formation and dynamics of planetary systems via numerical simulations. Traditional N-body simulations of multiple-planet systems without gas…
Planetary systems that orbit white dwarf stars can be studied via spectroscopic observations of the stars themselves. Numerous white dwarfs are seen to have accreted mostly rocky minor planets, the remnants of which are present in the…
Understanding the origin and long-term evolution of the Solar System is a fundamental goal of planetary science and astrophysics. This chapter describes our current understanding of the key processes that shaped our planetary system,…
Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar System's Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is…
In the last decade, about a dozen giant exoplanets have been directly imaged in the IR as companions to young stars. With photometry and spectroscopy of these planets in hand from new extreme coronagraphic instruments such as SPHERE at VLT…
Recent discoveries of extrasolar planets at small orbital radii, or with significant eccentricities, indicate that interactions between massive planets and the disks of gas and dust from which they formed are vital for determining the final…
Stars and planets are the fundamental objects of the Universe. Their formation processes, though related, may differ in important ways. Stars almost certainly form from gravitational collapse and probably have formed this way since the…
Understanding the Universe's origins and evolution remains one of the most fundamental challenges in modern cosmology. This white paper explores three key science priorities in this field: unravelling the physics of cosmic inflation,…
The detection and characterization of protoplanets in protoplanetary disks around young stars is emerging as a transformative field that will redefine our understanding of how planetary systems form. While current facilities have revealed…
The evolution of star clusters is studied using N-body simulations in which the evolution of single stars and binaries are taken self-consistently into account. Initial conditions are chosen to represent relatively young Galactic open…
The large scale structure of the Solar System has been shaped by a transient dynamical instability that may have been triggered by the interaction of the giants planets with a massive primordial disk of icy debris. In this work, we…
We conducted a survey for infrared excess emission from 16 nearby main sequence shell stars using the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS) on the Spitzer Space Telescope. Shell stars are early-type stars with narrow absorption…
A significant fraction of main-sequence stars are encircled by dusty debris discs, where the short-lived dust particles are replenished through collisions between planetesimals. Most destructive collisions occur when the orbits of smaller…
A significant fraction of the mature FGK stars have cool dusty disks at least an orders of magnitudes brighter than the solar system's outer zodiacal light. Since such dusts must be continually replenished, they are generally assumed to be…
Nearby associations of stars which are coeval are important benchmark laboratories because they provide robust measurements of stellar ages. The study of such coeval groups makes it possible to better understand star formation by studying…
Two decades ago, astronomers began detecting planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, so-called exoplanets. Since that time, the rate of detections and the sensitivity to ever-smaller planets has improved dramatically with several…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will revolutionize our understanding of exoplanets with transit spectroscopy of a wide range of mature planets close to their host stars ($<$2 AU) and with coronagraphic imaging and spectroscopy of…
Core Accretion, the most widely accepted scenario for planet formation, postulates existence of km-sized solid bodies, called planetesimals, arranged in a razor-thin disc in the earliest phases of planet formation. In the Tidal Downsizing…
Our understanding of planet formation has been rapidly evolving in recent years. The classical planet formation theory, developed when the only known planetary system was our own Solar System, has been revised to account for the observed…
Astronomical observations reveal that protoplanetary disks around young stars commonly have ring- and gap-like structures in their dust distributions. These features are associated with pressure bumps trapping dust particles at specific…