Recent insights into Planet Formation

I will discuss recent insights that we have gained into planet
formation form our solar system. In the first half of my talk, I will
focus on the Kuiper belt, located at the outskirts of our planetary
system, which provides a snapshot of earlier stages of planet
formation and is therefore an ideal laboratory for testing planet
formation theories. I will show how we can use the Kuiper belt size
distribution to gain new insights into runaway growth and initial
planetesimal sizes during planet formation and show how studying small
km-sized Kuiper belt objects enables us to put our Kuiper belt into
context of debris disks around other stars.  In the second half of my
talk, I will review dynamical models and geochemical constraints from
the Earth, Moon and Mars and discuss their implications for the last
stage of terrestrial planet formation.