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To date, at least three comets -- 2I/Borisov, C/2016 R2 (PanSTARRS), and C/2009 P1 (Garradd) -- have been observed to have unusually high CO concentrations compared to water. We attempt to explain these observations by modeling the effect…
Dust particles in space may appear as clusters of individual grains. The morphology of these clusters could be of a fractal or more compact nature. To investigate how the cluster morphology influences the calculated extinction of different…
Fragments of small solar system bodies entering Earth's atmosphere have possibly been important contributors of organic compounds to the early Earth. The cyano radical (CN) emission from meteors is considered as potentially one of the most…
Chondritic meteorites, the building blocks of terrestrial planets, are made of an out-of-equilibrium assemblage of solids formed at high and low temperatures, either in our Solar system or previous generations of stars. This was considered…
The theory of how low mass stars form from the collapse of a dense molecular cloud core has been well-established for decades. Thanks to significant progress in computing and numerical modelling, more physical models have been developed and…
Relatively small amounts (typically between 2-200 parts per million) of presolar grains have been preserved in the matrices of chondritic meteorites. The measured abundances of the different types of grains are highly variable from one…
Extinction maps at 8 micron from the Spitzer Space Telescope show that many Class 0 protostars exhibit complex, irregular, and on-axisymmetric structure within the densest regions of their dusty envelopes. Many of the systems have highly…
Tiny meteoroids entering the Earth's atmosphere and inducing meteor showers have long been thought to originate partly from cometary dust. Together with other dust particles, they form a huge cloud around the Sun, the zodiacal cloud. From…
Understanding the provenance of CI and CM chondrites, the most primitive materials in our meteorite collections, is critical for shedding light on the Solar System's early evolution and contextualizing findings from recent sample return…
Meteorite matrices from primitive chondrites are an interplay of ingredients at the sub-micron scale, which requires analytical techniques with the nanometer spatial resolution to decipher the composition of individual components in their…
We have determined the mineralogical composition of dust in the Broad Absorption Line (BAL) quasar PG 2112+059 using mid-infrared spectroscopy obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope. From spectral fitting of the solid state features, we…
Debris disks are the dust disks found around ~20% of nearby main sequence stars in far-IR surveys. They can be considered as descendants of protoplanetary disks or components of planetary systems, providing valuable information on…
Dynamical models of Solar System evolution have suggested that P-/D-type volatile-rich asteroids formed in the outer Solar System and may be genetically related to the Jupiter Trojans, the comets and small KBOs. Indeed, their spectral…
The class of meteorites called carbonaceous chondrites are examples of material from the solar system which have been relatively unchanged from the time of their initial formation. These meteorites have been classified according to the…
Observations of protoplanetary disks with high angular resolution using an ALMA interferometer showed that ring-shaped structures are often visible in their images, indicating strong disturbances in the disks. The mechanisms of their…
We discuss the morphology and spectrophotometry of 5 comets visible in August, 2001. We decompose comae into coma profiles and azimuthally renormalized images, in which general and local features are quantitatively comparable. Comet…
The origin of organic compounds detected in meteorites and comets, some of which could serve as precursors of life on Earth, still remains an open question. The aim of the present study is to make one more step in revealing the nature and…
In order to understand the origin and evolution of comets, one must decipher the processes that formed and processed cometary ice and dust. Cometary materials have diverse physical and chemical properties and are mixed in various ways.…
A fundamental question in cometary science is whether the different dynamical classes of comets have different chemical compositions, which would reflect different initial conditions. From the ground or Earth orbit, radio and infrared…
Asteroids and meteorites provide key evidence on the formation of planetesimals in the Solar System. Asteroids are traditionally thought to form in a bottom-up process by coagulation within a population of initially km-scale planetesimals.…