I will present an overview of the current status of the Extremely Large Telescope
(E-ELT) project, concentrating on recent developments. I will then discuss the
ELT instruments and then briefly address the proto-planetary disk science topics,
which these instruments will address.
The “GAPS” (Global Architecture of Planetary Systems) project gathers a large part of the Italian community working on exoplanets. In the past 5 years our radial velocity survey with HARPS-N at TNG was focused to the search and characterization of planetary systems around stars with different characteristics (M dwarf, stars with already known planets, metal-poor stars, members of open...
Recent spectacular high resolution observations of gaps and ring-like structures in nearby dusty protoplanetary disks have revived interest in studying gap-opening mechanisms. Among all the models proposed to explain the rings and gaps observed in these systems, the planet hypothesis is the most important to test, in order to advance our fundamental understanding of planet formation and...
During the process of planet formation, the planet-discs interactions might excite (or damp) the orbital eccentricity of the planet. In this talk, I will present two long (t ~ 3x10^5 orbits) numerical simulations: (a) one (with a relatively light disc, M_d/M_p=0.2) where the eccentricity initially stalls before growing at later times and (b) one (with a more massive disc, M_d/M_p=0.65) with...
The dust population in circumstellar disks is expected to steadily decrease with age due to its growth from µm-sized particles to planetesimals and planets. Using HD 163296’s circumstellar disk as a test-bench, we show that the formation of giant planets globally dynamically excites the planetesimal population embedded in disks. This dynamical excitation leads to a marked increase in...
Recent high-resolution ALMA observations of protoplanetary disks (e.g. Isella et al. 2016, PRL, 117; ALMA Partnership et al. 2015, ApJ Lett. 808:L3,10pp) triggered interest in studying solid bodies in discs at different scales, ranging from small sub-micron grains up to solid bodies of sizes of hundreds of meters, for which the dynamical evolution is governed by the interaction with the gas in...
