Related papers: Jupiter - friend or foe? I: the asteroids
In the coming decades, the discovery of the first truly Earth-like exoplanets is anticipated. The characterisation of those planets will play a vital role in determining which are chosen as targets for the search for life beyond the Solar…
A wealth of Earth-sized exoplanets will be discovered in the coming years, proving a large pool of candidates from which the targets for the search for life beyond the Solar system will be chosen. The target selection process will require…
Probabilities of collisions of migrating small bodies and dust particles produced by these bodies with planets were studied. Various Jupiter-family comets, Halley-type comets, long-period comets, trans-Neptunian objects, and asteroids were…
Judging from the fact that the planet Jupiter is bigger in size than the Earth by 10^3 while is smaller than the Sun by 10^3 and that the average distance of the Jupiter from the Sun is 5.203 a.u., the solar neutrinos, when encounter the…
The Juno mission has provided an accurate determination of Jupiter's gravitational field, which has been used to obtain information about the planet's composition and internal structure. Several models of Jupiter's structure that fit the…
Impactors have hit the Earth since its formation and have continued to be infrequent guests throughout the Earth's history. Although the early part of the Earth's history was marked by these violent events, life was present early, possibly…
Understanding chondrule formation provides invaluable clues about the origin of the solar system. Recent studies suggest that planetesimal collisions and the resulting impact melts are promising for forming chondrules. Given that the…
It is generally accepted today that our solar system has undergone a phase during which the orbits of the giant planets became very unstable. In recent years, many studies have identified traces of this event and have provided reasonable…
Asteroids formed in a dynamically quiescent disk but their orbits became gravitationally stirred enough by Jupiter to lead to high-speed collisions. As a result, many dozen large asteroids have been disrupted by impacts over the age of the…
A recent paper by Siraj & Loeb (2021) entitled "Breakup of a long-period comet as the origin of the dinosaur extinction" attempts to revive the perennial debate about what type of body hit the Earth 66 million years ago, triggering the…
Atmospheric nitrogen may be a necessary ingredient for the habitability of a planet since its presence helps to prevent water loss from a planet. The present day nitrogen isotopic ratio, $^{15}$N/$^{14}$N, in the Earth's atmosphere is a…
We investigate the possibility that the Moon's formation impact was triggered by an early dynamical instability of the giant planets. We consider the well-studied "jumping Jupiter" hypothesis for the solar system's instability, where…
Video observations of Jupiter obtained by amateur astronomers over the past eight years have shown five flashes of light of 1-2 s. The first three of these events occurred on 3 June 2010, 20 August 2010, and 10 September 2012. Previous…
Models of planet formation have shown that giant planets have a large impact on the number, masses and orbits of terrestrial planets that form. In addition, they play an important role in delivering volatiles from material that formed…
Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their…
We use the current orbital structure of large (>50km) asteroids in the main asteroid belt to constrain the evolution of the giant planets when they migrated from their primordial orbits to their current ones. Minton & Malhotra (2009) showed…
We know that giant planets played a crucial role in the making of our Solar System. The discovery of giant planets orbiting other stars is a formidable opportunity to learn more about these objects, what is their composition, how various…
Late accretion onto the Hadean Earth included large impacts that could have influenced early habitability, either by sterilizing the planet or alternatively catalyzing the origin of life by delivering iron required to create a reducing…
Centaurs are objects whose orbits are found between those of the giant planets. They are supposed to originate mainly from the TransNeptunian objects, and they are among the sources of NearEarth Objects.TransNeptunian Objects (TNOs) cross…
The Sun's gradual brightening will seriously compromise the Earth's biosphere within ~ 1E9 years. If Earth's orbit migrates outward, however, the biosphere could remain intact over the entire main-sequence lifetime of the Sun. In this…