Related papers: A free-floating planet population in the Galaxy?

The study of extra-solar planetary systems has emerged as a new discipline of observational astronomy in the past few years with the discovery of a number of extra-solar planets. The properties of most of these extra-solar planets were not…

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…

The search for satellites around exoplanets represents one of the greatest challenges in advancing the characterization of planetary systems. Currently, we can only detect massive satellites, which resemble additional planetary companions…

We carry out N-body simulations to examine the effects of dynamical interactions on planetary systems in young open star clusters. We explore how the planetary populations in these star clusters evolve, and how this evolution depends on the…

We consider trends resulting from two formation mechanisms for short-period super-Earths: planet-planet scattering and migration. We model scenarios where these planets originate near the snow line in ``cold finger'' circumstellar disks.…

Recent exoplanet surveys revealed that for solar-type stars, close-in Super-Earths are ubiquitous and many of them are in multi-planet systems. These systems are more compact than the Solar System's terrestrial planets. However, there have…

Radial velocity surveys suggest that the Solar System may be unusual and that Jupiter-like planets have a frequency <20% around solar-type stars. However, they may be much more common in one of the closest associations in the solar…

Exoplanets show a pile-up of Jupiter-size planets in orbits with a 3-day period. A fraction of these hot Jupiters have retrograde orbits with respect to the parent star's rotation. To explain these observations we performed a series of…

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.…

Most stars form in a clustered environment. Both single and binary stars will sometimes encounter planetary systems in such crowded environments. Encounter rates for binaries may be larger than for single stars, even for binary fractions as…

The recently observed population of 540 free-floating Jupiter-mass objects, including 40 dynamically soft pairs in the Trapezium cluster have raised interesting questions on their formation and evolution. We test various scenarios for the…

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…

Since the first massive planet in a short period orbit was discovered, the question arised how such an object could have formed. There are basically two formation scenarios: migration due to planet-disk or planet-planet interaction. Which…

The present dynamical configuration of planets in binary star systems may not reflect their formation process since the binary orbit may have changed in the past after the planet formation process was completed. An observed binary system…

Multiple studies have shown that planet-planet scattering plays an important role in the dynamical evolution of planetary systems. For instance, it has been shown that planet-planet scattering can reproduce the eccentricity distribution of…

Binary systems are very common among field stars. While this relatively small number of planets in binaries is probably partly due to strong observational biases, there is, however, statistical evidence that planets are indeed less frequent…

We produce synthetic populations of pulsars within our Galaxy and calculate the resulting scale heights as well as the radial and space velocity distributions of the pulsars. Results are presented for isolated pulsars, binary pulsars and…

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…

Among the extrasolar planetary systems about 30 are located in a stellar binary orbiting one of the stars, preferably the more massive primary. The dynamical influence of the second companion alters firstly the orbital elements of the…

Protoplanetary disks are thought to be the birth places of planetary systems. The formation and the subsequent evolution of protoplanetary disks are regulated by the star formation process, which begins with the collapse of a cloud core to…