Over the past two decades thousands of exoplanets have been discovered. These show an extensive variety in not only physical parameters, but also in planetary system architectures. However, no exoplanet system discovered thus far can be considered an analogue to the solar system.
A possible influence on the outcome of planet formation, and thus the composition and architecture of planetary systems, is the host star's birth environment. Many stars form from collapsing giant molecular clouds, and planet formation is expected to start while stars are still embedded in their parent cloud. This enhanced stellar and gas density can influence the planet-forming disks by means of its evaporation driven by radiation of massive cluster stars and by dynamical interactions with other planet-forming disks.
The goal of the project is to simultaneously model the process of star formation from a collapsing giant molecular cloud, the evolution of the planet forming disks, and the formation of planets from those disks. This numerical model will be assembled using the AMUSE framework, and it will be able to create a self-consistent synthetic population of planets, thus allowing us to assess the influence of a star's birth environment on its planetary system.
Mapping of the Milky Way is severely complicated by the extinction of electromagnetic radiation due to interstellar dust. However, this is not a problem for gravitational waves. Our galaxy is expected to contain tens of thousands of double white dwarfs that emit gravitational waves strongly enough to be detected by the LISA mission.
In this project a model galactic population of double white dwarfs was constructed by combining stellar population synthesis codes and a snapshot of a hydrodynamical simulation of a Milky Way-like galaxy. Of this population the expected detected fraction was estimated, and from this an attempt was made to reconstruct the spatial distribution of the initial population.
The project was further developed into a paper (Wilhelm, Korol, Rossi & D'Onghia) that has been accepted by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (ADS, arXiv)
Observations of protoplanetary disks in dense starforming regions such as the Orion Nebula sometimes show protoplanetary disks in the process of being evaporated by nearby luminous stars. These disks form comet-like tails and are referred to as proplyds.
The evaporation of these protoplanetary disks can potentially influence the formation of planets by starving the disk of gas and/or dust before or during planet formation. A model was developed that combined a gravitational N-body code and a viscous accretion disk code to simulate a cluster of newly formed stars and their disks. From the positions of the stars could be computed the total incident radiation on each disk, from which the photoevaporative mass loss rate could be obtained via the FRIED grid developed by Haworth et al.
This project was further developed into a paper (Concha-Ramírez, Wilhelm, Portegies Zwart & Haworth 2019) that has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (ADS, arXiv).