Related papers: Impact cratering and the Oort cloud
Most stars form in dense stellar environments, where frequent close encounters can strongly perturb and reshape the early architecture of planetary systems. The solar system, with its rich population of distant comets, provides a natural…
In this paper, we present a study about the dynamical effects of the Galaxy on the external region of the Oort Cloud. The aims of this paper are: i) to determine an outer limit for the Oort Cloud; and ii) to analyse the dynamical behaviour…
Many exoplanets in close-in orbits are observed to have relatively high eccentricities and large stellar obliquities. We explore the possibility that these result from planet-planet scattering by studying the dynamical outcomes from a large…
The motions of comets and neutron stars have been integrated over five billion years in the Galactic potential to determine a gamma-ray burst distribution, presuming that bursts are the result of interactions between these two families of…
The giant planet occurrence rate rises with orbital period out to at least $\sim$300 days. Large-scale planetary migration through the disk has long been suspected to be the physical origin of this feature, as the timescale of standard Type…
Impact crater counts on the Saturnian satellites are a key element for estimating their surface ages and placing constraints on their impactor population. The Cassini mission radar observations allowed crater counts to be made on the…
Giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are believed to affect the biospheres of planets as their host star passes through them. We simulate the trajectories of stars and GMCs in the Galaxy and determine how often stars pass through GMCs. We find a…
Planets grow in rotating disks of dust and gas around forming stars, some of which can subsequently collide in giant impacts after the gas component is removed from the disk. Monitoring programs with the warm Spitzer mission have recorded…
Two recent papers claimed to have found a periodic variation of the galactic cosmic ray (CR) flux over the last 1-2 Gyr, using the CR exposure ages of iron meteorites. This was attributed to higher CR flux during the passage of the Earth…
The TRAPPIST-1 system is unique in that it has a chain of seven terrestrial Earth-like planets located close to or in its habitable zone. In this paper, we study the effect of potential cometary impacts on the TRAPPIST-1 planets and how…
Comets provide a valuable window into the chemical and physical conditions at the time of their formation in the young solar system. We seek insights into where and when these objects formed by comparing the range of abundances observed for…
In 1958 Jan Oort remarked that the lack of old clusters in the solar neighborhood (SN) implies that clusters are destroyed on a timescale of less than a Gyr. This is much shorter than the predicted dissolution time of clusters due to…
Planetesimals in the primordial disc may have experienced a collisional cascade. If so, the comet nuclei later placed in the Kuiper belt, scattered disc, and Oort Cloud would primarily be fragments and collisional rubble piles from that…
As the Galactic tide acts to decouple bodies from the scattered disk it creates a spiral structure in physical space that is roughly 15,000 au in length. The spiral is long-lived and persists in the inner Oort cloud to the present time.…
In the Nice model, the late heavy bombardment (LHB) is related to an orbital instability of giant planets which causes a fast dynamical dispersion of a transneptunian cometary disk. We study effects produced by these hypothetical cometary…
The cratering history of main belt asteroid (2867) Steins has been investigated using OSIRIS imagery acquired during the Rosetta flyby that took place on the 5th of September 2008. For this purpose, we applied current models describing the…
The complete sample of large-perihelion nearly-parabolic comets discovered during the period 1901-2010 is studied starting from their orbit determination. Next, an orbital evolution that includes three perihelion passages…
Young massive stars in the center of crowded star clusters are expected to undergo close dynamical encounters that could lead to energetic, explosive events. However, there has so far never been clear observational evidence of such a…
Corotating interaction regions (CIRs) are compressions that form in stellar winds when streams of different speeds collide. They form an Archimedean spiral around the star and can compress any exoplanetary magnetospheres they impact. They…
Many asteroids show indications they have undergone impacts with meteoroid particles having radii between 0.01 m and 1 m. During such impacts, small dust grains will be ejected at the impact site. The possibility of these dust grains (with…