From Protoplanetary Disks To Planet Formation

Is the Sun and its planetary system special? How did the Solar system form? Are there similar systems in the Galaxy? How common are habitable planets? What processes take place in the early life of stars and in their surrounding circumstellar disks that could impact whether life emerges or not? This book is based on the lectures by Philip Armitage and Wilhelm Kley presented at 45th Saas-Fee Advanced Course „From Protoplanetary Disks to Planet Formation“ of the Swiss Society for Astrophysics and Astronomy. The first part deals with the physical processes occurring in proto-planetary disks starting with the observational context, structure and evolution of the proto-planetary disk, turbulence and accretion, particle evolution and structure formation. The second part covers planet formation and disk-planet interactions. This includes in detail dust and planetesimal formation, growth to protoplanets, terrestrial planet formation, giant planet formation, migration of planets, multi-planet systems and circumbinary planets. As Saas-Fee advanced course this book offers PhD students an in-depth treatment of the topic enabling them to enter on a research project in the field.

A self-contained graduate-level introduction to the physical processes that shape planetary systems, covering all stages of planet formation.

Graduate-level textbook providing a basic understanding of the astrophysical processes for readers in planetary science, and observational and theoretical astronomy.

This book's interdisciplinary scope aims at bridging various communities: 1) cosmochemists, who study meteoritic samples from our own solar system, 2) (sub-) millimetre astronomers, who measure the distribution of dust and gas of star-forming regions and planet-forming discs, 3) disc modellers, who describe the complex photo-chemical structure of parametric discs to fit these to observation, 4) computational astrophysicists, who attempt to decipher the dynamical structure of magnetised gaseous discs, and the effects the resulting internal structure has on the aerodynamic re-distribution of embedded solids, 5) theoreticians in planet formation theory, who aim to piece it all together eventually arriving at a coherent holistic picture of the architectures of planetary systems discovered by 6) the exoplanet observers, who provide us with unprecedented samples of exoplanet worlds. Combining these diverse fields the book sheds light onto the riddles that research on planet formation is currently confronted with, and paves the way for a comprehensive understanding of the formation, evolution, and dynamics of young solar systems. The chapters ‘Chondrules – Ubiquitous Chondritic Solids Tracking the Evolution of the Solar Protoplanetary Disk’, ‘Dust Coagulation with Porosity Evolution’ and ‘The Emerging Paradigm of Pebble Accretion’ are published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

When this book was published in 2006, it had been just over ten years since the first planet outside our solar system was detected. Since then, much work has focused on understanding how extrasolar planets may form, and discovering the frequency of potentially habitable Earth-like planets. This volume addresses fundamental questions concerning the formation of planetary systems in general, and of our solar system in particular. Drawing from advances in observational, experimental and theoretical research, it summarises our understanding of the planet formation processes, and addresses major open questions and research issues. Chapters are written by leading experts in the field of planet formation and extrasolar planet studies. The book is based on a meeting held at Ringberg Castle in Bavaria, where experts gathered together to present and exchange their ideas and findings. It is a comprehensive resource for graduate students and researchers, and is written to be accessible to newcomers to the field.

This book presents pioneering work on a critical observational test of the planet formation theory based on the theoretical study of the water snowline, beyond which water takes the form of ice, in the protoplanetary disks – the place where planets are formed. Since the water snowline is thought to divide the regions of rocky and gas-giant planet formation, the location of the snowline is essential for the planet formation process. The book proposes a novel method to locate the snowlines using high-dispersion spectroscopic observations of water vapor lines, which is based on in sophisticated chemical modeling and line radiative transfer calculations. The author obtained the water vapor distribution in the disks using the chemical reaction network, which includes photoreactions and gas–grain interactions. The simulated transition lines of water vapor in the disks demonstrate that relatively weak transition lines with moderate excitation energies are the best tracers of water snowline. Furthermore, the author observed submillimeter lines of water vapor in a disk using ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) to obtain the upper limit of the line fluxes with the highest sensitivity to date. These unprecedented findings are important in locating the snowlines in the disks, and the method goes a long way toward achieving a comprehensive understanding of the planet formation processes as well as of the origin of water on rocky planets, including our Earth, based on future observations using ALMA and SPICA (Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics).

"This volume integrates the cross-disciplinary aspects of this broad field. Covering a wide range of scales, from the formation of large clouds in our Milky Way galaxy down to small chondrules in our solar system, it takes an encompassing view with the goal of highlighting what we know and emphasizing the frontiers of what we do not know"--

Protoplanetary disks around young stars are the sites of planetary formation. Recent high spatial resolution observations from both ground and space have revealed wide varieties of disk morphology and composition. This diversity of disk properties is certainly the seeds for the well known diversity of about 350 exoplanets so far detected. Encouraged with the recent success of direct imaging of exoplanets, next generation high-contrast instruments on the 8-m class telescopes are starting to fully explore direct observations of both exoplanets and disks. This international conference was held to give an overview of this rapidly developing field and promote discussion on future studies among observers, theorists, and instruments.