Related papers: Free floating planets in stellar clusters?
An overview of our current understanding of the formation and evolution of star clusters is given, with main emphasis on high-mass clusters. Clusters form deeply embedded within dense clouds of molecular gas. Left-over gas is cleared within…
Circumbinary planets whose orbits become unstable may be ejected, accreted, or even captured by one of the stars. We quantify the relative rates of these channels, for a binary of secondary star's mass fraction 0.1 with an orbit of 1AU. The…
A large fraction of stars are formed in dense clusters. In the cluster, close encounters between stars at distances less than 100 au are common. It has been shown that during close encounters planets can transfer between stars. Such…
Over 50 circumbinary exoplanets have been discovered in recent years, with several of them being gas giants on wide orbits ($>10$AU). The aim of this work is to investigate whether these planets can form through circumbinary disc…
Extrasolar planets abound in almost any possible configuration. However, until five years ago, there was a lack of planets orbiting closer than 0.5 au to giant or subgiant stars. Since then, recent detections have started to populated this…
We place limits on the population of non-recycled pulsars originating in globular clusters through Monte Carlo simulations and frequentist statistical techniques. We set upper limits on the birth rates of non-recycled cluster pulsars and…
Most stars do not form in isolation but as part of a cluster comprising anywhere between a few dozen to several million stars with stellar densities ranging from 0.01 to several 10$^5$ \Msun pc$^{-3}$. The majority of these clusters…
A detailed understanding of the physics of star and planet formation requires study of individual objects as well as statistical assessment of global properties and evolutionary trends. Observational investigations of circumstellar material…
Recent observations have revealed two new classes of planetary orbits. Rossiter- Mclaughlin (RM) measurements have revealed hot Jupiters in high-obliquity orbits. In addition, direct-imaging has discovered giant planets at large (~ 100 AU)…
Most stars do not form in isolation, but as part of a star cluster or association. These young stars are initially surrounded by protoplanetary discs. In these cluster environments tidal interactions with other cluster members can alter the…
Most stars form in highly clustered environments within molecular clouds, but eventually disperse into the distributed stellar field population. Exactly how the stellar distribution evolves from the embedded stage into gas-free associations…
We explore the orbital dynamics of systems consisting of three planets, each as massive as the Earth, on coplanar, initially circular, orbits about a star of one solar mass. The initial semimajor axes of the planets are equally spaced in…
Observations of exoplanets have revealed that systems with planets on closely-spaced orbits are common, which motivates the question "How closely can planets orbit to one another and still be dynamically-stable for very long times?". To…
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…
To date, several exoplanets have been discovered orbiting stars with close binary companions (a~<30 AU). The fact that planets can form in these dynamically challenging environments implies that planet formation must be a robust process.…
We used a sample of Kepler candidate planets with orbital periods less than 200 days and radii between 1.5 and 30 Earth radii to determine the typical dynamical spacing of neighboring planets. To derive the intrinsic (i.e., free of…
Observations indicate that disc fragmentation due to Gravitational Instability (GI) is the likely origin of massive companions to stars, such as giant planets orbiting M-dwarf stars, Brown Dwarf (BD) companions to FGK stars, and binary…
The large eccentricities of many giant extrasolar planets may represent the endpoint of gravitational scattering in initially more crowded systems. If so, the early evolution of the giant planets is likely to be more restrictive of…
We investigated the underlying architecture of planetary systems by deriving the distribution of planet multiplicity (number of planets) and the distribution of orbital inclinations based on the sample of planet candidates discovered by the…
We numerically studied close encounters between a young stellar system hosting a massive, gravitationally fragmenting disk and an intruder diskless star with the purpose to determine the evolution of fragments that have formed in the disk…