Related papers: Stellar encounters as the origin of distant solar …
The apparent regularity of the motion of the giant planets of our solar system suggested for decades that said planets formed onto orbits similar to the current ones and that nothing dramatic ever happened during their lifetime. The…
Extrasolar debris disks are the dust disks found around nearby main sequence stars arising from the break-up of asteroids and comets orbiting the stars. Far-IR surveys (e.g., with Herschel) showed that ~20% of stars host detectable dust…
Planet formation is often considered in the context of one circumstellar disk around one star. Yet stellar binary systems are ubiquitous, and thus a substantial fraction of all potential planets must form and evolve in more complex,…
Chaotic dynamics are expected during and after planet formation, and a leading mechanism to explain large eccentricities of gas giant exoplanets is planet-planet gravitational scattering. The same scattering has been invoked to explain…
The most puzzling property of the extrasolar planets discovered by recent radial velocity surveys is their high orbital eccentricities, which are very difficult to explain within our current theoretical paradigm for planet formation.…
The formation and early evolution of circumstellar discs often occurs within dense, newborn stellar clusters. For the first time, we apply the moving-mesh code AREPO, to circumstellar discs in 3-D, focusing on disc-disc interactions that…
Until about a decade ago, ring systems were only known to exist around giant planets. Each one of the four giant planets harbours its own distinctive and unique system of rings and inner satellites. The past decade has been marked by the…
Although the majority of radial velocity detected planets have been found orbiting solar-type stars, a fraction of them have been discovered around giant stars. These planetary systems have revealed different orbital properties when…
The scattering of small bodies by planets is an important dynamical process in planetary systems. We present an analytical model to describe this process using the simplifying assumption that each particle's dynamics is dominated by a…
Milli-arcsecond astrometry provided by Hipparcos and by radio observations makes it possible to retrace the orbits of some of the nearest runaway stars and pulsars to determine their site of origin. The orbits of the runaways AE Aurigae and…
Exoplanets are organized in a broad array of orbital configurations that reflect their formation along with billions of years of dynamical processing through gravitational interactions. This history is encoded in the angular momentum…
The Einstein rings and proper motions of nearby stars tend to be large. Thus, every year some foreground stars within a few hundred parsecs of Earth induce gravitational lensing events in background stars. In some of these cases, the events…
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 last three decades the asteroid (1) Ceres is an object of the intensive ground-and space-based observations. A new unusual contributing to these studies represents the recent detection of localized sources of water vapour releasing from…
The angle between the spin axis of the host star and the orbit of its planets (i.e., the stellar obliquity) is precious information about the formation and evolution of exoplanetary systems. Measurements of the Rossiter-McLaughlin effect…
The Sun likely formed as part of a group of stars. A close stellar flyby by one of the solar siblings is probably responsible for the sharp outer edge in the solar system`s mass distribution. The frequency of such close flybys can be used…
We consider the high eccentricity, 0.66, of the newly discovered planet around 16 Cyg B, using the fact that the parent star is part of a wide binary. We show that the high eccentricity of the planet could be the result of tidal forces…
Unlike the Solar System planets, thousands of smaller bodies beyond Neptune orbit the Sun on eccentric ($e >$ 0.1) and ($i>$ 3$^\circ$) orbits. While migration of the giant planets during the early stages of Solar System evolution can…
The Scattered Disk Objects (SDOs) are a population of trans-Neptunian bodies with semimajor axes $50< a \lesssim 1000$ au and perihelion distances $q \gtrsim 30$ au. The detached SDOs with orbits beyond the reach of Neptune (roughly…
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…