The study of the exoplanets orbiting around young stars (e.g., younger than a few tens of million of years) offer the important opportunity for studying the early evoalutionary phases of those processes that shape the architecture of planetary systems. However, it is quite difficult to detect and study exoplanets around young stars, because of their low number, the complexity of their
Several stellar phenomena and evolutionary processes are connected to their magnetic fields. The mechanisms that allow stars to produce their magnetic fields depend on their internal structure and stellar properties. One dominant property is stellar rotation: the faster stars rotate, the more intense their magnetic field and magnetic activity. Since stellar rotation declines with age, it is not surprising that
To date (November 2023), we have confirmed the presence of 5539 exoplanets in 4128 planetary systems. These numbers indicate that, in the majority of cases, we have identified one planet per planetary system. This limitation is primarily due to observational constraints, as it remains challenging to detect small exoplanets with long orbital periods (distant from their stars several astronomical units,
The corona is the outermost part of the Solar atmosphere, filled with plasma at temperatures reaching several million degrees. The mechanism responsible for heating the Solar plasma to these temperatures is a long-standing problem. It began in the 1930s when physicists Bengt Edlen and Walter Grotrian proposed that the mysterious spectroscopic lines observed in the corona were not due to
Today in the Milky Way, star formation typically occurs in low-mass environments. Young star clusters (e.g., younger than 10 million years), in fact, typically have a mass of a few hundred solar masses. Nevertheless, our Galaxy hosts a few very massive star-forming regions that can produce tens to hundreds of thousands of stars, including some of the most massive stars
The two giant planets of the Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn, played an important role in shaping the properties and architecture of the inner solar system. This may be a quite general rule. The presence of giant planets, for instance, can be responsible for a less effective migration of solids and gas toward the inner part of planetary systems, inhibiting
The corona is the outermost part of the atmosphere of the vast majority of stars, where the plasma is heated to millions of degrees by stellar magnetic activity. Since both the intensity and the topology of the stellar magnetic fields depend on the internal structure of stars, the study of coronal activity allows astronomers to better understand both the high-energy
Estimating stellar ages can prove to be a challenging task. The methods typically employed for estimating stellar ages rely on our understanding of how fundamental stellar properties that can be observed change as stars age. This often results in measurements that lack precision, particularly for stars in the main sequence, which is a stable evolutionary phase during which stellar properties
Radiogalaxies are galaxies characterized by intense emission of radio waves, primarily produced by relativistic particles in motion along magnetic field lines (known as synchrotron emission). This radio emission is the result of the activity of a supermassive black hole situated at the center of these galaxies, giving rise to a plasma jet that extends over thousands or even millions of
Typically, planets did not form at the distance from their central stars where we observe them today. In fact, during their early evolution, planets migrate from their initial orbit until the system reaches its final configuration. Planetary migration can be induced by several processes: the interaction between the newborn planets and the protoplanetary disk where they formed, the gravitational interaction
