The Solar System 2. Группа авторов

that of exoplanetology. The extraordinary variety of objects discovered around other stars, both in terms of their orbits and their physical parameters, has raised new questions about the formation scenarios of planetary systems; the discovery of the phenomenon of migration in these systems has encouraged new research on the origin and evolution of our own Solar System. The discovery of a large proportion of rocky exoplanets – the “super-Earths” – has also stimulated work in exobiology with the ultimate goal of finding life on one of these exoplanets. Over the last 30 years, planetary scientists have forged increasingly close links with other astronomers (who are at the origin of the discovery of exoplanets), but also with geophysicists, chemists and biologists interested in the problem of the emergence of life, on Earth or elsewhere.

      The plan of the work follows the main course of the previous works. The first volume opens with three general chapters. Chapter 1 presents a general description of the Solar System. Chapter 2 describes the environment of the Solar System, the formation of stars and planets within the disks as well as the extrasolar planets. Chapter 3 deals with the interaction of the Solar System with the interplanetary medium. Chapters 4 and 5 present a description of telluric and giant planets. The second volume presents the satellites and rings of giant planets (Chapter 1), comets, asteroids and dwarf planets (Chapter 2), meteorites and cosmochemistry (Chapter 3), the formation and dynamics of the Solar System (Chapter 4), the origin of life and extraterrestrial life (Chapter 5), and lastly, the methods of study of the Solar System (Chapter 6). Almost all of these chapters are composed of original texts. In the few cases where we have relied on texts from the last edition of the Solar System (2003), we have explicitly mentioned it. We thank J.-P. Bibring, M. Blanc, M.-A. Barucci and P. Zarka for their contributions in the previous book.

      This book is intended primarily for students of planetology, astrophysics and geophysics at the undergraduate and graduate level, but we hope that it can be read with benefit by all scientists, researchers and engineers wishing to deepen their knowledge of planetology.

      June 2021