Related papers: Asteroids Were Born Big
Metal-rich asteroids and iron meteorites are considered core remnants of differentiated planetesimals and or products of oxygen-depleted accretion. Investigating the origins of iron-rich planetesimals could provide key insights into planet…
The large scale structure of the Solar System has been shaped by a transient dynamical instability that may have been triggered by the interaction of the giants planets with a massive primordial disk of icy debris. In this work, we…
The initial stages of planet formation in circumstellar gas discs proceed via dust grains that collide and build up larger and larger bodies (Safronov 1969). How this process continues from metre-sized boulders to kilometre-scale…
In this Letter we show that if planetesimals form in spiral features in self-gravitating discs, as previously suggested by the idealised simulations of Rice et al, then in realistic protostellar discs, this process will be restricted to the…
The size distribution of small asteroids in the Main Belt is assumed to be determined by an equilibrium between the creation of new bodies out of the impact debris of larger asteroids and the destruction of small asteroids by collisions…
Understanding the collisional fragmentation and subsequent reaccumulation of fragments is crucial for studies of the formation and evolution of the small-body populations. Using an SPH / N-body approach, we investigate the size-frequency…
Previous work on protoplanetary dust growth shows halt at centimeter sizes owing to the occurrence of bouncing at velocities of $\geq$ 0.1 $ms^{-1}$ and fragmentation at velocities $\geq$ 1 $ms^{-1}$. To overcome these barriers, spatial…
Gas-giant planets, such as Jupiter, Saturn and massive exoplanets, were formed via the gas accretion onto the solid cores each with a mass of roughly ten Earth masses. However, rapid radial migration due to disk-planet interaction prevents…
Chondrules probably formed during a small window of time $\sim$1-4 Ma after CAIs, when most solid matter in the asteroid belt was already in the form of km-sized planetesimals. They are unlikely, therefore, to be ``building blocks" of…
Planets grow via the collisional accretion of small bodies in a protoplanetary disk. Such small bodies feel strong gas drag and their orbits are significantly affected by the gas flow and atmospheric structure around the planet. We…
Planet formation around one component of a tight, eccentric binary system such as $\gamma$ Cephei (with semimajor axis around 20 AU) is theoretically challenging because of destructive high-velocity collisions between planetesimals. Despite…
We have initiated a large project on identifying the requirements for developing a realistic and ground-up approach to simulating the formation of terrestrial planets in our solar system. As the first phase of this project, we present here…
The Kepler transit survey with follow-up spectroscopic observations has discovered numerous super-Earth sized planets and revealed intriguing features of their sizes, orbital periods, and their relations between adjacent planets. For the…
A rapidly growing body of observational results suggests that planet formation takes place preferentially at high metallicity. In the core accretion model of planet formation this is expected because heavy elements are needed to form the…
It is likely that multiple bodies with masses between those of Mars and Earth ("planetary embryos") formed in the outer planetesimal disk of the solar system. Some of these were likely scattered by the giant planets into orbits with…
The formation of the first planetesimals and the final growth of planetary cores relies on the abundance of small pebbles. The efficiencies of both the streaming instability (SI) process, suggested to catalyze the early growth of…
(abridged) Accretion in protoplanetary discs is thought to be driven by [...] turbulence via the magnetorotational instability (MRI). Recent work has shown that a planetesimal swarm embedded in a fully turbulent disc is subject to strong…
We describe calculations for the formation of icy planets and debris disks at 30-150 AU around 1-3 solar mass stars. Debris disk formation coincides with the formation of planetary systems. As protoplanets grow, they stir leftover…
(Abridged) Recent surveys of young star formation regions have shown that the average Class II object does not have enough dust mass to make the cores of giant planets. Younger Class 0/I objects have enough dust in their embedded disk,…
The similar orbital distances and detection rates of debris disks and the prominent rings observed in protoplanetary disks suggest a potential connection between these structures. We explore this connection with new calculations that follow…