Related papers: Binary YORP and Evolution of Binary Asteroids

YORP-induced fission events may form dynamically coherent pairs or even families of asteroids. The outcome of this process is well documented among members of the main asteroid belt, but not in the case of the near-Earth asteroid (NEA)…

Near-Earth asteroid (1862) Apollo has strong detections of both orbital semimajor axis drift and rotational acceleration. We produce a unified model that can accurately match both observed effects using a single set of thermophysical…

Close to the Roche radius of a white dwarf (WD), an asteroid on a circular orbit sheds material that then adopts a very similar orbit. Observations of the resulting debris show a periodic behavior and changes in flux on short timescales,…

The majority of white dwarfs that host periodic transiting planetary debris do so at distances that exceed the rubble-pile Roche limit, in disagreement with canonical formation models that focus on the tidal disruption of minor planets.…

The Yarkovsky (orbital drift) and YORP (spin state change) effects play important roles in the dynamical and physical evolution of asteroids. Thermophysical modelling of these observed effects, and of thermal-infrared observations, allows a…

The discovery of over 50 planets around evolved stars and more than 35 debris discs orbiting white dwarfs highlight the increasing need to understand small body evolution around both early and asymptotic giant branch (GB) stars. Pebbles and…

Asteroid 2012 TC4 is a small ($\sim$10 m) near-Earth object that was observed during its Earth close approaches in 2012 and 2017. Earlier analyses of light curves revealed its excited rotation state. We collected all available photometric…

Many binary minor planets (BMPs; both binary asteroids and binary Trans-Neptunians objects; TNOs) are known to exist in the Solar system. The currently observed orbital and physical properties of BMPs hold essential information and clues…

Understanding the fate of planetary systems through white dwarfs which accrete debris crucially relies on tracing the orbital and physical properties of exo-asteroids during the giant branch phase of stellar evolution. Giant branch…

We present radiation hydrodynamic simulations in which binary planets form by close encounters in a system of several super-Earth embryos. The embryos are embedded in a protoplanetary disk consisting of gas and pebbles and evolve in a…

Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their…

A widely-held assumption is that each single white dwarf containing observable rocky debris requires the presence of at least one terrestrial or giant planet to have gravitationally perturbed the progenitor of the debris into the star.…

NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission will kinetically impact Dimorphos, the secondary component of the Didymos binary asteroid system, which will excite Dimorphos's dynamical state and lead to significant libration about…

Asteroid pairs sharing similar heliocentric orbits were found recently. Backward integrations of their orbits indicated that they separated gently with low relative velocities, but did not provide additional insight into their formation…

Atmospheric heavy elements have been observed in more than a quarter of white dwarfs (WDs) at different cooling ages, indicating ongoing accretion of asteroidal material, whilst only a few per cent of the WDs possess a dust disk, and all…

Binary asteroid formation is a highly complex process, which has been highlighted with recent observations of satellites with unexpected shapes, such as the oblate Dimorphos by the NASA DART mission and the contact binary Selam by NASA's…

The tidal evolution of planets orbiting brown dwarfs (BDs) presents an interesting case study because BDs' terrestrial planet forming region is located extremely close-in. In fact, the habitable zones of BDs range from roughly 0.001 to 0.03…

Aims. We investigate the influence of the Yarkovsky force on the long-term orbital evolution of Jupiter Trojan asteroids. Methods. Clones of the observed population with different sizes and different thermal properties were numerically…

Knowledge of the surface thermal inertia of an asteroid can provide insight into surface structure: porous material has a lower thermal inertia than rock. We develop a means to estimate thermal inertia values of asteroids and use it to show…

Didymos is a binary near-Earth asteroid. It is the target of the DART and HERA space missions. The primary body, Didymos, rotates close to the spin at which it is expected to shed mass. The secondary body, Dimorphos, is a 140 meters moon…