From stars and disks to planets:Reconstructing the formation of Solar Systems

Abstract

Young stellar clusters are the laboratories to explore our understanding of how stars and their planets form and interact with their environment. Putting together clusters with different ages, we can witness the time evolution that brings us from the less evolved objects, to the precursors of our Solar System, tracking the processes for a large number of sources to investigate the underlying physics and statistics. Nevertheless, although young clusters are typically attributed a representative age and disk fraction and treated as a single entity, we are increasingly finding that this is often not the case: clusters are by far more diverse, and their substructures betray a variety of star formation histories, which are connected to the initial conditions of the protoplanetary disks and their final outcome as planets. The way disks get converted into planetary systems is also not smooth nor follows a single line. The interplay of different processes, together with the different initial conditions of disks, is expected to lead to various evolutionary pathways that may explain the diversity of extrasolar planetary systems. Finally, the planet-disk-star connection, where matter transport is driven through the disk and channelled onto the star, affects both planets sizes and locations as well as the properties of the stars. Here, I review the observational results and existing challenges in the field of star and planet formation, and how we can use an increasing body of data, with wavelength-, spatial- and time-resolution, to probe further into the evolution of young stars and disks