Related papers: Jupiter - friend or foe? I: the asteroids
Earth-like planets are expected to provide the greatest opportunity for the detection of life beyond the Solar System. However our planet cannot be considered a fair sample, especially if intelligent life exists elsewhere. Just as a…
Is life a common outcome of physical and chemical processes in the universe? Within our own solar system, a successful search for even primitive life, were it to have an origin independent from life on Earth, would dramatically advance a…
The origin of hot Jupiters -- gas giant exoplanets orbiting very close to their host stars -- is a long-standing puzzle. Planet formation theories suggest that such planets are unlikely to have formed in-situ but instead may have formed at…
Proper characterization of the host star to a planet is a key element to the understanding of its overall properties. The star has a direct impact through the modification of the structure and evolution of the planet atmosphere by being the…
The problem of origin and age of asteroid families is studied very intensively. First of all youngest families are interesting due to possibility of the reconstruction their collisional history. But in oldest families present objects with…
How good is our universe at making habitable planets? The answer to this depends on which factors are important for life: Does a planet need to be Earth mass? Does it need to be inside the temperate zone? are systems with hot Jupiters…
The detectability of planetesimal impacts on imaged exoplanets can be measured using Jupiter during the 1994 comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 events as a proxy. By integrating the whole planet flux with and without impact spots, the effect of the…
The long-term dynamical future of the Sun's planets has been simulated and statistically analyzed in great detail, but most prior work considers the solar system as completely isolated, neglecting the potential influence of field star…
Here we show an example of a young asteroid cluster located in a dynamically stable region, which was produced by partial disruption of a primitive body about 30 km in size. We estimate its age to be only 1.9 +/- 0.3 Myr, thus its…
We provide a brief review of many aspects of the planetary physics of hot Jupiters. Our aim is to cover most of the major areas of current study while providing the reader with additional references for more detailed follow-up. We first…
Changes in planetary obliquity, or axial tilt, influence the climates on Earth-like planets. In the solar system, the Earth's obliquity is stabilized due to interactions with our moon and the resulting {small amplitude variations…
Studies from recent years have reached different conclusions regarding how frequently super-Earths are accompanied by long period giant planets and vice versa. This relation has been predicted to be mass dependent by planet formation…
Close encounters of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) with large asteroids are a possible source of systematic errors in trajectory propagations and asteroid mitigation. It is, thus, necessary to identify those large asteroids that have to be…
Aims. Particles ejected from the lunar surface via hypervelocity impacts form a torus between the Earth and the Moon. According to our previous study (Yang et al., A\&A, 659, A120), among them about $2.3\times10^{-4}\,\mathrm{kg/s}$…
Humanity's path to avoiding extinction is a daunting and inevitable challenge which proves difficult to solve, partially due to the lack of data and evidence surrounding the concept. We aim to address this confusion by addressing the most…
Radiometric dating indicates that Mars accreted in the first ~4 Myr of solar system formation, which coincides with the formation and possible migration of Jupiter. While nebular gas from the protoplanetary disk was still present, Jupiter…
The Earth contains between one and ten oceans of water, including water within the mantle, where one ocean is the mass of water on the Earth's surface today. With $n$-body simulations we consider how much water could have been delivered…
Cosmic radiation backgrounds are a constraint on life, and their distribution will affect the Galactic Habitable Zone. Life on Earth has developed in the context of these backgrounds, and characterizing event rates will elaborate the…
A large fraction of known Jupiter like exoplanets are inflated as compared to Jupiter. These "hot" Jupiters orbit close to their parent star and are bombarded with intense starlight. Many theories have been proposed to explain their radius…
The difference between the measured atmospheric abundances of neon, argon, krypton and xenon for Venus, the Earth and Mars is striking. Because these abundances drop by at least two orders of magnitude as one moves outward from Venus to…