Related papers: On the Origin of Pluto's Minor Moons, Nix and Hydr…
We investigate resonant capture of small bodies by planets that migrate inwards, using analytic arguments and three-body integrations. If the orbits of the planet and the small body are initially circular and coplanar, the small body is…
Simple theoretical calculations have suggested that small body impacts onto Pluto's newly discovered small satellites, Nix and Hydra, are capable of generating time-variable rings or dust sheets in the Pluto system. Using HST/ACS data…
Pluto's first known moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978 (Christy 1978) and has a diameter about half that of Pluto (Buie 1992,Young 1994, Sicardy 2005), which makes it larger relative to its primary than any other moon in the Solar System.…
Approximately 10-20% of all Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) occupy mean-motion resonances with Neptune. This dynamical configuration likely resulted from resonance capture as Neptune migrated outward during the late stages of planet formation.…
The outer giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, pose a challenge to theories of planet formation. They exist in a region of the Solar System where long dynamical timescales and a low primordial density of material would have conspired to make…
Jupiter and Saturn formed in a few million years (Haisch et al. 2001) from a gas-dominated protoplanetary disk, and were susceptible to gas-driven migration of their orbits on timescales of only ~100,000 years (Armitage 2007). Hydrodynamic…
Disk migration and high-eccentricity migration are two well-studied theories to explain the formation of hot Jupiters. The former predicts that these planets can migrate up until the planet-star Roche separation ($a_{Roche}$) and the latter…
A search for temporal changes on Pluto and Charon was motivated by (1) the discovery of young surfaces in the Pluto system that imply ongoing or recent geologic activity, (2) the detection of active plumes on Triton during the Voyager 2…
Three planets with minimum masses less than 10 Earth masses orbit the star HD 40307, suggesting these planets may be rocky. However, with only radial velocity data, it is impossible to determine if these planets are rocky or gaseous. Here…
The motions of small moons through Saturn's rings provide excellent tests of radial migration models. In theory, torque exchange between these moons and ring particles leads to radial drift. We predict that moons with Hill radii r_H ~ 2-24…
It is now accepted that the Solar system's youth was a dynamic and chaotic time. The giant planets migrated significant distances to reach their current locations, and evidence of that migration's influence on the Solar system abounds. That…
Due to the angular momentum exchange with planetesimals, Neptune might have migrated outward to the current position, and captured many Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) into resonances. We set up a semi-analytic model to simulate the outward…
The formation of the solar system's giant planets predated the ultimate epoch of massive impacts that concluded the process of terrestrial planet formation. Following their formation, the giant planets' orbits evolved through an episode of…
The angular momentum of the present Earth-Moon system could be acquired at the collision of two identical rarefied condensations with sizes of Hill spheres which total mass was about 0.1 of the mass of the Earth. Solid embryos of the Earth…
Exoplanet discoveries have motivated numerous efforts to find unseen populations of exomoons, yet they have been unsuccessful. A plausible explanation is that most discovered planets are located on close-in orbits, which would make their…
We explore planetary migration scenarios for formation of high inclination Neptune Trojans (NTs) and how they are affected by the planetary migration of Neptune and Uranus. If Neptune and Uranus's eccentricity and inclination were damped…
In a solid, electrons can be scattered both by phonons and other electrons. First proposed by Landau, scattering by phonons can lead to a composite entity called a polaron, in which a lattice distortion traps an itinerant electron (or hole)…
The missing mass problem has not been solved decisively yet. Observations show that if gravity is to be modified, then the MOND theory is its excellent approximation on galactic scales. MOND suggests an adjustments of the laws of physics in…
The number of exoplanets found with periods as short as one day and less was surprising given how fast these planets had been expected to migrate into the star due to the tides raised on the star by planets at such close distances. It has…
In the near-Earth asteroid population, binary and triple systems have been discovered with mutual orbits that have significant eccentricities as well as large semi-major axes. All known systems with eccentric orbits and all widely-separated…