Related papers: Binary YORP and Evolution of Binary Asteroids
The eccentric short-period O-star binary BD+60 497 is an interesting laboratory in which to study tidal interactions in massive binary systems, notably via the detection and characterisation of apsidal motion. The rate of apsidal motion in…
N-body numerical simulations code for the orbital motion of asteroids/planetesimals within the asteroid belt under the gravitational influence of the sun and the accreting planets has been developed. The aim is to make qualitative, and to…
Many asteroids are rubble piles with irregular shapes. While the irregular shapes of large asteroids may be attributed to collisional events, those of small asteroids may result from not only impact events but also rotationally induced…
The orbital elements of extreme mass ratio binaries will be modified by interactions with surrounding circumstellar disks. For brown dwarf companions to Solar-type stars the resulting orbital migration is sufficient to drive short period…
Stars are commonly formed in binary systems, which provide a natural laboratory for studying planet formation in extreme conditions. In our first paper (Paper I) of a series Xie et al. (2011), we have shown that the intermediate stage -…
Analysis of laboratory experiments simulating space weathering optical effects on atmosphereless planetary bodies reveals that the time needed to alter the spectrum of an ordinary chondrite meteorite to resemble the overall spectral shape…
Surveys of young star-forming regions have discovered a growing population of planetary-mass (<13 M_Jup) companions around young stars. There is an ongoing debate as to whether these companions formed like planets (that is, from the…
Interacting binaries are of general interest as laboratories for investigating the physics of accretion, which gives rise to the bulk of high-energy radiation in the Galaxy. They allow us to probe stellar evolution processes that cannot be…
Understanding the dynamical evolution of asteroids through the secular Yarkovsky effect requires the determination of many physical properties, including the rotation period. We propose a method aimed at obtaining a robust determination of…
Previous efforts have modeled the Didymos system as two irregularly shaped rigid bodies, although it is likely that one or both components are in fact rubble piles. Here, we relax the rigid-body assumption to quantify how this affects the…
Recent observations (Burnes et al 2002,Veillet et al 2002, Margot et al 2002a) have revealed an unexpectedly high binary fraction among the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) that populate the Kuiper Belt. The TNO binaries are strikingly…
Tens of thousands of sparse-in-time lightcurves from astrometric projects are publicly available. We investigate these data and use them in the lightcurve inversion method to derive new asteroid models. By having a greater number of models…
To date, two planetary systems have been discovered with close-in, terrestrial-mass planets (< 5-10 Earth masses). Many more such discoveries are anticipated in the coming years with radial velocity and transit searches. Here we investigate…
We study the formation, evolution and physical properties of accretion disks formed via wind capture in binary systems. Using the AMR code AstroBEAR, we have carried out high resolution 3D simulations that follow a stellar mass secondary in…
Observations of the Kuiper Belt indicate that a larger than expected percentage of KBO's (approximately 8 out of 500) are in binary pairs. The formation and survival of such objects presents a conundrum [1]. Two competing theories have been…
We consider the dependence of the internal structure of a neutron star in a close binary system on the semi-major axis of the binary orbit, focusing on the case when the Roche lobes of the components are nearly filled. We adopt a polytropic…
With the successful impact of the NASA DART spacecraft in the Didymos-Dimorphos binary asteroid system, we provide an initial analysis of the post-impact perturbed binary asteroid dynamics. To compare our simulation results with…
In 2022 the DART mission spacecraft impacted the asteroid Dimorphos, the secondary body of the binary Didymos system, ejecting a large number of dust particles, rocks and boulders. The ESA Hera mission will reach the system in 2026 for…
The discovery of CoRoT-7b, a planet of radius 1.68 +/- 0.09 R_E, mass 4.8 +/- 0.8 M_E and orbital period of 0.854 days demonstrates that small planets can orbit extremely close to their star. We use knowledge of hot Jupiters, mass loss…
The full two-body problem (F2BP) is often used to model binary asteroid systems, representing the bodies as two finite mass distributions whose dynamics are influenced by their mutual gravity potential. The emergent behavior of the F2BP is…