Related papers: Internal Structure of Massive Terrestrial Planets
Several transiting super-Earths are expected to be discovered in the coming few years. While tools to model the interior structure of transiting planets exist, inferences about the composition are fraught with ambiguities. We present a…
The formation of the solar system's giant planets predated the ultimate epoch of massive impacts that concluded the process of terrestrial planet formation. Following their formation, the giant planets' orbits evolved through an episode of…
Prior work has found that a variety of terrestrial planetary compositions are expected to occur within known extrasolar planetary systems. However, such studies ignored the effects of giant planet migration, which is thought to be very…
Earth's mass and internal structure have been primarily studied through gravitational and seismic methods. Neutrinos, however, offer an independent way to explore Earth's interior via matter effects in neutrino oscillations that depend on…
A measurement by microlensing of the planetary mass function of planets with masses ranging from 5M_E to 10M_J and orbital radii from 0.5 to 10 AU was reported recently. A strategy for extending the mass range down to (1-3)M_E is proposed…
The formation of super-Earths is strongly linked to the structure of the protoplanetary disc, which determines growth and migration. In the pebble accretion scenario, planets grow to the pebble isolation mass, at which the planet carves a…
The growth and composition of Earth is a direct consequence of planet formation throughout the Solar System. We discuss the known history of the Solar System, the proposed stages of growth and how the early stages of planet formation may be…
The newly formed giant planets may have migrated and crossed a number of mutual mean motion resonances (MMRs) when smaller objects (embryos) were accreting to form the terrestrial planets. We investigated the effects of the…
Venus' mass and radius are similar to those of Earth. However, dissimilarities in atmospheric properties, geophysical activity and magnetic field generation could hint towards significant differences in the chemical composition and interior…
We investigate the melt production of planetary impacts as a function of planet size ($R/R_\mathrm{Earth}$=0.1-1.5), impactor size ($L$=1-1000 km), and core size ratio ($R_\mathrm{core}/R$=0.2-0.8) using a combination of parameterized…
Mercury's core mass fraction (CMF) is ~0.7, more than double that of the other rocky planets in the solar system, which have CMFs of ~0.3. The origin of Mercury's large, iron-rich core remains unknown. Adding to this mystery, an elusive…
The two current models for giant planet formation are core accretion and disk instability. We discuss the core masses and overall planetary enrichment in heavy elements predicted by the two formation models, and show that both models could…
We investigate mantle stripping giant impacts (GI) between super-Earths with masses between 1 M$_{\oplus}$ and 20 M$_{\oplus}$. We infer new scaling laws for the mass of the largest fragment and its iron mass fraction, as well as updated…
The Kepler transit survey with follow-up spectroscopic observations has discovered numerous super-Earth sized planets and revealed intriguing features of their sizes, orbital periods, and their relations between adjacent planets. For the…
Super-Earths are the most abundant planets known to date and are characterized by having sizes between that of Earth and Neptune, typical orbital periods of less than 100 days and gaseous envelopes that are often massive enough to…
We develop a simple model of planetary formation, focusing our attention on those planets with masses less than 10 Earth masses and studying particularly the primordial spin parameters of planets resulting from the accretion of…
We present a novel, model-independent framework for studying the architecture of an exoplanetary system at the system level. This framework allows us to characterise, quantify, and classify the architecture of an individual planetary…
Evidence of mutually inclined planetary orbits has been reported for giant planets these last years. Here we aim to study the impact of eccentric and inclined massive giant planets on the terrestrial planet formation process, and…
In this work, we extensively investigate the formation of near 4:2:1 mean motion resonances (MMRs) configuration by performing two sets of N-body simulations. We model the eccentricity damping, gas drag, type I and type II planetary…
The majority of discovered exoplanetary systems harbour a new class of planets, bodies typically several times more massive than Earth but orbiting their host stars well inside the orbit of Mercury. The origin of these close-in super-Earths…