Stellar Cartography

Bridging Stellar Evolution And Planet Formation: From Birth, To Survivors Of The Fittest, To The Second Generation Of Planets

By Keith Cowing

Press Release

December 23, 2025

Filed under astronomy, ESO Expanding Horizons initiative, exoplanet, Protoplanetary Disk, Stellar Cartography

Bridging Stellar Evolution And Planet Formation: From Birth, To Survivors Of The Fittest, To The Second Generation Of Planets — This illustration shows a star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. A new study uses data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and four ground-based telescopes to determine the distance from a star to the inner rim of its surrounding protoplanetary disk. Researchers used a method called “photo-reverberation,” also known as “light echoes.– NASA (source)

Stars and planets form, live, and evolve in unison. Throughout the life of a star, dusty circumstellar discs and stellar outflows influence the further evolution of both the star(s) and their orbiting planet(s).

Planet-forming discs, winds of red giant branch (RGB) or asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, and post-RGB/post-AGB discs are examples of such host environments where dust physics plays a key role. The physical processes that occur during each of these stages establishes how the Solar System as well as exoplanetary systems were formed, are evolving, and will eventually die.

This White Paper aims to bridge the fields of stellar evolution and planet formation by peering into the dust kinematics and macrostructure formation, and its effect on planet-host interaction, in dusty environments from stellar birth to death. Near-future advancements in the 2030s will enable the detection, orbital monitoring and atmospheric/mineralogical characterisation of close-in (proto)planets across diverse stages of stellar evolution.

To take full advantage of these developments by the 2040s, we should develop the capabilities required to image the varied dusty environments in which planets are entrained over their lifetime. This will enable extensive testing of current theoretical understandings – from the micro-scales of dust assembly to the deeply interlinked macro-scales of planet-host interactions – across diverse settings often too small, distant, and faint to be resolved in the next decade, simultaneously providing valuable constraints on the two-way interplay of dusty host environments and planetary formation/evolution.

Akke Corporaal, Toon De Prins, Léa Planquart, Kateryna Andrych, Narsireddy Anugu, Devika Kamath, Jens Kammerer, Stefan Kraus, Fonteini Lykou, Alexis Matter, Claudia Paladini, Marie M. Rodríguez S., Hans Van Winckel

Comments: Science white paper submitted in the context of ESO’s Expanding Horizons call
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2512.17976 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2512.17976v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.17976
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Submission history
From: Akke Corporaal
[v1] Fri, 19 Dec 2025 12:09:40 UTC (10 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17976

Astrobiology, exoplanet,

Keith Cowing

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻

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