Related papers: Asteroids Were Born Big
The origins of carbonaceous asteroids in the asteroid belt is not fully understood. The leading hypothesis is that they were not born at their current location but instead implanted into the asteroid belt early in the Solar System history.…
Planetesimals are compact astrophysical objects roughly 1-1000 km in size, massive enough to be held together by gravity. They can grow by accreting material to become full-size planets. Planetesimals themselves are thought to form by…
Forming gas giant planets by the accretion of 100 km diameter planetesimals, a typical size that results from self-gravity assisted planetesimal formation, is often thought to be inefficient. Many models therefore use small km-sized…
In this work, we construct a new model for the collisional evolution of the main asteroid belt. Our goals are to test the scaling law of Benz and Asphaug (1999) and ascertain if it can be used for the whole belt. We want to find initial…
Observations of dusty debris disks can be used to test theories of planetesimal coagulation. Planetesimals of sizes up to a couple thousand kms are embedded in these disks and their mutual collisions generate the small dust grains that are…
Remnant planetesimals might have played an important role in reducing the orbital eccentricities of the terrestrial planets after their formation via giant impacts. However, the population and the size distribution of remnant planetesimals…
The sticking of micron sized dust particles due to surface forces in circumstellar disks is the first stage in the production of asteroids and planets. The key ingredients that drive this process are the relative velocity between the dust…
Debris disks around main-sequence stars are believed to derive from planetesimal populations that have accreted at early epochs and survived possible planet formation processes. While debris disks must contain solids in a broad range of…
An unsolved issue in the standard core accretion model for gaseous planet formation is how kilometre-sized planetesimals form from, initially, micron-sized dust grains. Solid growth beyond metre sizes can be difficult both because the…
The consistency of planet formation models suffers from the disconnection between the regime of small and large bodies. This is primarily caused by so-called growth barriers: the direct growth of larger bodies is halted at centimetre-sized…
Large main-belt asteroids (diameter $D \gtrsim 120\ \mathrm{km}$) exhibit a surface composition gradient as a function of heliocentric distance, ranging from anhydrous bodies to those rich in hydrated and, possibly, ammoniated materials.…
The solid content of circumstellar disks is inherited from the interstellar medium: dust particles of at most a micrometer in size. Protoplanetary disks are the environment where these dust grains need to grow at least 13 orders of…
Chondrules are millimeter-sized spherules that dominate primitive meteorites (chondrites) originating from the asteroid belt. The incorporation of chondrules into asteroidal bodies must be an important step in planet formation, but the…
The asteroid belt is the leftover of the original planetesimal population in the inner solar system. However, currently the asteroids have orbits with all possible values of eccentricities and inclinations compatible with long-term…
We present N-body simulations of planetary accretion beginning with 1 km radius planetesimals in orbit about a 1 solar mass star at 0.4 AU. The initial disk of planetesimals contains too many bodies for any current N-body code to integrate;…
The debate over whether kilometer-sized solids, or planetesimals, assemble by collision-induced chemical sticking or by gravity-driven unstable modes remains unsettled. In light of recent work showing that gravitational growth can occur…
The current picture of terrestrial planet formation relies heavily on our understanding of the dynamical evolution of planetesimals -- asteroid-like bodies thought to be planetary building blocks. In this study we investigate the growth of…
The growth and migration of planetesimals in a young protoplanetary disc are fundamental to planet formation. In all models of early growth, there are several processes that can inhibit grains from reaching larger sizes. Nevertheless,…
We study the collisional evolution of km-sized planetesimals in tight binary star systems to investigate whether accretion towards protoplanets can proceed despite the strong gravitational perturbations from the secondary star. The orbits…
Two basic routes for planetesimal formation have been proposed over the last few decades. One is a classical "slow-growth" scenario. Another one is particle concentration models, in which small pebbles are concentrated locally and then…