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We review recent progress in understanding how nebular dust and gas are converted into the planets of the present-day solar system, focusing particularly on the "Grand Tack" and pebble accretion scenarios. The Grand Tack can explain the observed division of the solar system into two different isotopic "flavours", which are found in both differentiated and undifferentiated meteorites. The isotopic chronology inferred for the development of these two "flavours" is consistent with expectations of gas-giant growth and nebular gas loss timescales. The Grand Tack naturally makes a small Mars and a depleted, dynamically-excited and compositionally mixed asteroid belt (as observed); it builds both Mars and the Earth rapidly, which is consistent with the isotopically-inferred growth timescale of the former, but not the latter. Pebble accretion can explain the rapid required growth of Jupiter and Saturn, and the number of Kuiper Belt binaries, but requires specific assumptions to explain the relatively protracted growth timescale of Earth. Pure pebble accretion cannot explain the mixing observed in the asteroid belt, the fast proto-Earth spin rate, or the tilt of Uranus. No current observation requires pebble accretion to have operated in the inner solar system, but the thermal and compositional consequences of pebble accretion have yet to be explored in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of extrasolar planets have been detected in close orbits around nearby stars. It is probable that these planets did not form in these orbits but migrated from their formation locations beyond the ice line. Orbital migration mechanisms involving angular momentum transfer through tidal interactions between the planets and circumstellar gas-dust disks or by gravitational interaction with a residual planetesimal disk together with several means of halting inward migration have been identified. These offer plausible schemes to explain the orbits of observed extrasolar giant planets and giant planets within the Solar System. Recent advances in numerical integration methods and in the power of computer workstations have allowed these techniques to be applied to modelling directly the mechanisms and consequences of orbital migration in the Solar System. There is now potential for these techniques also to be applied to modelling the consequences of the orbital migration of planets in the observed exoplanetary systems. In particular the detailed investigation of the stability of terrestrial planets in the habitable zone of these systems and the formation of terrestrial planets after the dissipation of the gas disk is now possible. The stability of terrestrial planets in the habitable zone of selected exoplanetary systems has been established and the possibility of the accretion of terrestrial planets in these systems is being investigated by the author in collaboration with Barrie W. Jones (Open University), and with John Chambers (NASA-Ames) and Mark Bailey of Armagh Observatory, using numerical integration. The direct simulation of orbital migration by planetesimal scattering must probably await faster hardware and/or more efficient algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]