Related papers: Free floating planets in stellar clusters?
Observations of young star-forming regions suggest that star clusters are born completely mass segregated. These initial conditions are, however, gradually lost as the star cluster evolves dynamically. For star clusters with single stars…
Recent ground-based microlensing surveys suggest that our Galaxy may abound with small free floating planets, potentially up to $\sim$21 such planets per star. We explore the implication of such possibility on the mass budget for planet…
Under the current microlensing planet search strategy of monitoring events caused by stellar-mass lenses, only planets located within a narrow region of separations from central stars can be effectively detected. However, with the dramatic…
Most stars are born in dense stellar environments where the formation and early evolution of planetary systems may be significantly perturbed by encounters with neighbouring stars. To investigate on the fate of circumstellar gas disks and…
The timescale over which planets may form in the circumstellar disks of young stars is one of the main issues of current planetary formation models. We present here new constraints on planet formation timescales derived from the rotational…
A large fraction of stars forming in our galaxy are born within clusters embedded in giant molecular clouds. In these environments, the background UV radiation fields impinging upon circumstellar disks can often dominate over the radiation…
The majority of stars in known star-forming regions are located in binary systems. Although the separation distribution of these populations varies from one region to another, most peak between a few and several tens of AU. Given the >100…
The orbital distributions of currently observed extrasolar giant planets allow marginally stable orbits for hypothetical, terrestrial planets. In this paper, we propose that many of these systems may not have additional planets on these…
Exoplanets are typically thought to form in protoplanetary disks left over from protostellar disk of their newly formed host star. However, additional planetary formation and evolution routes may exist in old evolved binary systems. Here we…
Star clusters are observed to form in a highly compact state and with low star-formation efficiencies, and only 10 per cent of all clusters appear to survive to middle- and old-dynamical age. If the residual gas is expelled on a dynamical…
We have determined the amount of stellar mass segregation in over 50 globular clusters and ultra-faint dwarf galaxy candidates based on deep HST and ground-based photometry. We find that the amount of mass segregation in globular clusters…
Simulations of the effects of stellar fly-bys on planetary systems in star-forming regions show a strong dependence on subtle variations in the initial spatial and kinematic substructure of the regions. For similar stellar densities, the…
Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…
Most stars form in a cluster environment. These stars are initially surrounded by discs from which potentially planetary systems form. Of all cluster environments starburst clusters are probably the most hostile for planetary systems in our…
What is the numerical reproducibility of a stellar system (including its discs) when evolving only a sub-set of (partially-evolved) smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) particles? To investigate this, we modelled the evolution of 29 star…
The discovery of Jupiter-mass planets in close orbits about their parent stars has challenged models of planet formation. Recent observations have shown that a number of these planets have highly inclined, sometimes retrograde orbits about…
Populations of young star clusters show significant differences even among "normal" disk galaxies. In this contribution I discuss how properties of young cluster systems are related to those of their host galaxies, based on a recent study…
We investigate the dissolution process of young embedded star clusters with different primordial mass segregation levels using fractal distributions by means of N-body simulations. We combine several star clusters in virial and subvirial…
Planet Planet scattering is a leading dynamical mechanism invoked to explain the present orbital distribution of exoplanets. Many stars belong to binary systems, therefore it is important to understand how this mechanism works in presence…
We present a statistical study of the post-formation migration of giant planets in a range of initial disk conditions. For given initial conditions we model the evolution of giant planet orbits under the influence of disk, stellar, and mass…