Related papers: Free floating planets in stellar clusters?
The nature and origin of free-floating planets (FFPs) are still largely unconstrained because of a lack of large homogeneous samples to enable a statistical analysis of their properties. So far, most FFPs have been discovered using indirect…
Young stars are mostly found in dense stellar environments, and even our own Solar system may have formed in a star cluster. Here, we numerically explore the evolution of planetary systems similar to our own Solar system in star clusters.…
Most stars form in star clusters and stellar associated. To understand the roles of star cluster environments in shaping the dynamical evolution of planetary systems, we carry out direct $N$-body simulations of four planetary systems models…
The majority of stars form in star clusters and many are thought to have planetary companions. We demonstrate that multi-planet systems are prone to instabilities as a result of frequent stellar encounters in these star clusters much more…
In clustered environments, stellar encounters can liberate planets from their host stars via close encounters. Although the detection probability of planets suggests that the planet population in open clusters resembles that in the field,…
Recent observations have shown the presence of extra-solar planets in Galactic open stellar clusters, as in the Praesepe (M44). These systems provide a favorable environment for planetary formation due to the high heavy-element content…
Recent gravitational microlensing observations predict a vast population of free-floating giant planets that outnumbers main sequence stars almost twofold. A frequently-invoked mechanism for generating this population is a dynamical…
The existence of giant planets on wide orbits ($\stackrel{>}{_\sim}100$AU) challenge planet formation theories; the core accretion scenario has difficulty in forming them, whereas the disc instability model forms an overabundance of them…
Stars formed in clusters can encounter other stars at close distances. In typical open clusters in the Solar neighbourhood containing hundreds or thousands of member stars, ten to twenty per cent of Solar-mass member stars are expected to…
The discovery of planets around PSR~1257+12 suggests that planetary systems may be detected around the recycled pulsars found in globular clusters. Planetary systems in dense clusters have lifetimes to disruption due to perturbations by…
The ejection of planets by the instability of planetary systems is a potential source of free-floating planets. We numerically simulate multi-planet systems to study the evolution process, the properties of surviving systems, and the…
In the solar neighborhood, where the typical relaxation timescale is larger than the cosmic age, at least 10\% to 15\% of Sun-like stars have planetary systems with Jupiter-mass planets. In contrast, dense star clusters, charactered by…
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,…
Most stars and their planets form in open clusters. Over 95 per cent of such clusters have stellar densities too low (less than a hundred stars per cubic parsec) to withstand internal and external dynamical stresses and fall apart within a…
The discovery of Exoplanetary Systems has challenged some of the theories of planet formation, which assume unperturbed evolution of the host star and its planets. However, in star clusters the interactions with flyby stars and binaries may…
The stars that populate the solar neighbourhood were formed in stellar clusters. Through N-body simulations of these clusters, we measure the rate of close encounters between stars. By monitoring the interaction histories of each star, we…
The majority of discovered exoplanets have been observed orbiting field stars as opposed to within a star cluster. To determine whether the lack of observed exoplanets in star clusters is due to gravitational perturbations or observational…
Close encounters between stars in star forming regions are important as they can perturb or destroy protoplanetary discs, young planetary systems, and stellar multiple systems. We simulate simple, viralised, equal-mass $N$-body star…
The chance that a planetary system will interact with another member of its host star's nascent cluster would be greatly increased if gas giant planets form in situ on wide orbits. In this paper, we explore the outcomes of planet-planet…
This paper studies the dynamical evolution of young stellar clusters with $N$ = 100 - 1000 members. We use N-body simulations to explore how evolution depends on system size $N$ and the initial conditions. Motivated by recent observations…