Related papers: Observational Constraints on Dust Disk Lifetimes: …
Determining the sequence of events in the formation of stars and planetary systems and their time-scales is essential for understanding those processes, yet establishing ages is fundamentally difficult because we lack direct indicators. In…
Debris disks offer valuable insights into the latest stages of circumstellar disk evolution, and can possibly help us to trace the outcomes of planetary formation processes. In the age range 10 to 100\,Myr, most of the gas is expected to…
We characterize the first 40 Myr of evolution of circumstellar disks through a unified study of the infrared properties of members of young clusters and associations with ages from 2 Myr up to ~ 40 Myr: NGC 1333, NGC 1960, NGC 2232, NGC…
We present 4.5, 8, and 16um photometry from the Spitzer Space Telescope for 204 stars in the Upper Scorpius OB Association. The data are used to investigate the frequency and properties of circumstellar disks around stars with masses…
Observed IR excesses indicate that protoplanetary discs evolve slowly for the majority of their lifetime before losing their near- and mid-IR excesses on short timescales. Photoevaporation models can explain this "two-timescale" nature of…
Grain growth in circumstellar disks is expected to be the first step towards the formation of planetary systems. There is now evidence for grain growth in several disks around young stars. Radially resolved images of grain growth in…
We present stellar age profiles for 64 Virgo cluster disk galaxies whose analysis poses a challenge for current galaxy formation models. Our results can be summarized as follows: first, and contrary to observations of field galaxies, these…
The dust in the interstellar medium, that provides the material for forming stars - and circumstellar discs as a natural by-product - is known to have submicron sizes. As these discs are the sites of planet formation, those small grains are…
We review recent advances in our understanding of the innermost regions of the circumstellar environment around young stars, made possible by the technique of long baseline interferometry at infrared wavelengths. Near-infrared observations…
Recent observations have suggested that circumstellar disks may commonly form around young stellar objects. Although the formation of circumstellar disks can be a natural result of the conservation of angular momentum in the parent cloud,…
We have conducted an N-band survey of 14 young stars in the ~30 Myr-old Tucana-Horologium Association to search for evidence of warm, circumstellar dust disks. Using the MIRAC-BLINC camera on the Magellan I (Baade) 6.5-m telescope, we find…
The current picture painted by the observations of circumstellar dust at white dwarfs, and the consequent atmospheric pollution, is of a surviving planetary system. This chapter recounts in detail both the discovery and empirical…
A relation between the mass accretion rate onto the central young star and the mass of the surrounding protoplanetary disk has long been theoretically predicted and observationally sought. For the first time, we have accurately and…
Stars may be assembled in large growth spurts, however the evidence for this hypothesis is circumstantial. Directly studying the accretion at the earliest phases of stellar growth is challenging because young stars are deeply embedded in…
The $\sigma$ Orionis cluster is important for studying protoplanetary disk evolution, as its intermediate age ($\sim$3-5 Myr) is comparable to the median disk lifetime. We use ALMA to conduct a high-sensitivity survey of dust and gas in 92…
Context. Protoplanetary discs are the birthplaces of planets. Recent studies highlight the role of stellar mass sampling in determining disc lifetimes from the observed fraction of stars with discs. Low-mass stars tend to host longer-lived…
Context. Multiple mechanisms are known to give rise to turbulence in protoplanetary disks, which facilitates the accretion onto the central star. Small dust particles that are well coupled to the gas undergo diffusion due to this turbulent…
Debris disks are dusty, gas-poor disks around main sequence stars (Backman & Paresce 1993; Lagrange, Backman & Artymowicz 2000; Zuckerman 2001). Micron-sized dust grains are inferred to exist in these systems from measurements of their…
We report on the discovery of correlations between dust and CO gas tracers of the 0.1-10 au region in planet-forming disks around young intermediate-mass stars. The abundance of refractory elements on stellar photospheres decreases as the…
This chapter reviews the dynamical processes in young stellar clusters. The accretion of gas by individual stars affects the dynamics of the cluster, and the masses of the stars. Dynamical mass segregation cannot explain the degree of mass…