Related papers: What is a planet?
Planet formation occurs around a wide range of stellar masses and stellar system architectures. An improved understanding of the formation process can be achieved by studying it across the full parameter space, particularly toward the…
Studies of transiting extra-solar planets are of key importance for understanding the nature of planets outside our Solar System, because their densities can be determined, constraining of what the planets are made of. Using the data…
6500+ exoplanets have been detected using various techniques. This prompted the emergence of many recent works on the taxonomy, or classification, of exoplanets. However, there is still no basic, fundamental definition of 'What is a…
We address three questions regarding solar system planets. What determined their number? Why are their orbits nearly circular and coplanar? How long did they take to form? Runaway accretion in a disk of small bodies resulted in a tiny…
The concept of sphere of influence of a planet is useful in both the context of impact monitoring of asteroids with the Earth and of the design of interplanetary trajectories for spacecrafts. After reviewing the classical results, we…
Debris disks are the dust disks found around ~20% of nearby main sequence stars in far-IR surveys. They can be considered as descendants of protoplanetary disks or components of planetary systems, providing valuable information on…
This paper reviews the dynamics of the growth of solid particles from micron-sized dust grains to planets in protostellar accretion disks. The formation and orbital evolution of giant protoplanets is also discussed.
The Milky way Galaxy is brimming with free-floating objects, including stars, planets and planetesimals. For the purpose of this chapter, we define a free-floating object as a solid body that is not orbited by a considerably more massive…
The current IAU definition of "planet" is problematic because it is vague and excludes exoplanets. Here, we describe aspects of quantitative planetary taxonomy and examine the results of unsupervised clustering of Solar System bodies to…
This review is based on lectures given at the 45th Saas-Fee Advanced Course 'From Protoplanetary Disks to Planet Formation' held in March 2015 in Les Diablerets, Switzerland. Starting with an overview of the main characterictics of the…
Giant planets dominate the mass of many planetary systems, including the Solar System, and represent the best-characterized class of extrasolar planets. Understanding the formation of giant planets bridges the high mass end of the planet…
The discovery of an increasing number of Jupiter-like planets in orbit around other stars (or extra-solar planets) is a promising first step toward the search for Life in the Universe. We review all aspects of the question: - definition of…
Giant planets are tens to thousands of times as massive as the Earth, and many times as large. Most of their volumes are occupied by hydrogen and helium, the primary constituents of the protostellar disks from which they formed.…
Planetary systems have their origin in the gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. Through a process of accretion, is formed a massive star and a disk of planetesimals orbiting the star. Using a formalism analogous to quantum…
Debris disk is a catch-all term that can be used to refer to any component of a planetary system which is not an actual planet. In the Solar System this refers to the asteroids and comets in the Asteroid and Kuiper belts as well as the dust…
According to the sequential accretion model, giant planet formation is based first on the formation of a solid core which, when massive enough, can gravitationally bind gas from the nebula to form the envelope. In order to trigger the…
Planets are a natural byproduct of the stellar formation process, resulting from local aggregations of material within the disks surrounding young stars. Whereas signatures of gas-giant planets at large orbital separations have been…
Exoplanets around different types of stars provide a window into the diverse environments in which planets form. This chapter describes the observed relations between exoplanet populations and stellar properties and how they connect to…
Models of planet formation are built on underlying physical processes. In order to make sense of the origin of the planets we must first understand the origin of their building blocks. This review comes in two parts. The first part presents…
We review the current theoretical understanding how growth from micro-meter sized dust to massive giant planets occurs in disks around young stars. After introducing a number of observational constraints from the solar system, from observed…