Related papers: Impact cratering on Mercury: consequences for the …
Many multiple-planet systems have been found by the Kepler transit survey and various radial velocity (RV) surveys. Kepler planets show an asymmetric feature, namely, there are small but significant deficits/excesses of planet pairs with…
Understanding the diverse formation and migration pathways that shape exoplanetary systems requires characterizing both their atmospheric properties and their orbital dynamics. A key dynamical diagnostic is the projected spin-orbit angle -…
Uranus has a tilted rotation axis, which is supposed to be caused by a giant impact. In general, an impact event also changes the internal compositional distribution and drives mass ejection from the planet, which may provide the origin of…
<Abridged> The impact of a meteoroid onto an asteroid transfers linear and angular momentum to the larger body, which may affect its orbit and its rotational state. Here we show that the meteoroid environment of our Solar System can have an…
The traditional view of the morphology-spin connection is being challenged by recent integral-field-unit observations, as the majority of early-type galaxies are found to have a rotational component that is often as large as a dispersion…
The upcoming space missions, MESSENGER and BepiColombo with onboard instrumentation capable of measuring the rotational parameters stimulate the objective to reach an accurate theory of the rotational motion of Mercury. For obtaining the…
Using a fully autonomous spacecraft - Bering - we propose to detect and study sub-km asteroids from an orbit within the asteroid Main Belt. The main purpose of the proposed Bering mission is to detect a statistically significant sample of…
We numerically investigate the migration of dust particles with initial orbits close to those of the numbered asteroids. The fraction of silicate particles that collided with the Earth during their lifetimes varied from 0.2% for 40 micron…
In planetary systems with sufficiently small inter-planet spacing, close encounters can lead to planetary collisions/mergers or ejections. We study the spin property of the merger products of two giant planets in a statistical manner using…
Many of the observed spin--orbit alignment properties of exoplanets can be explained in the context of the primordial disk misalignment model, in which an initially aligned protoplanetary disk is torqued by a distant stellar companion on a…
Our Solar system is almost entirely devoid of material interior to Mercury's orbit, in sharp contrast to the multiple Earth masses of material commonly residing within the analogous region of extrasolar planetary systems. Recent work has…
We present a set of numerical simulations of the dynamical evolution of compact planetary systems migrating in a protoplanetary disk whose inner edge is sculpted by the interaction with the stellar magnetic field, as described in Yu et al.…
Giant impacts refer to collisions between two objects each of which is massive enough to be considered at least a planetary embryo. The putative collision suffered by the proto-Earth that created the Moon is a prime example, though most…
Debris disks are scaled-up analogs of the Kuiper Belt in which dust is generated by collisions between planetesimals. In the "collisional cascade" model of debris disks, dust lost to radiation pressure and winds is constantly replenished by…
The dynamical and physical properties of asteroid family members are widely used to reconstruct the collisional evolution of the main belt and of individual objects. Families offer insights into the properties of the parent bodies and the…
The origins of Uranus and Neptune are not fully understood. Their inclined rotation axes -- obliquities -- suggest that they experienced giant impacts during their formation histories. Simulations modeling their accretion from giant impacts…
Planets with masses between 0.1 - 10 M_earth are believed to host dense atmospheres. These atmospheres can play an important role on the planet's spin evolution, since thermal atmospheric tides, driven by the host star, may counterbalance…
We combine several constraints provided by the crater records on Arrokoth and the worlds of the Pluto system to compute the size-frequency distribution (SFD) of the crater production function for craters with diameter D<10km. For this…
We study the evolution of debris created in the giant impacts expected during the final stages of terrestrial planet formation. The starting point is the debris created in a simulation of the Moon-forming impact. The dynamical evolution is…
We describe in this work a thorough study of the physical and orbital characteristics of extensively observed main-belt and Trojan binaries, mainly taken from the LAOSA (Large Adaptive Optics Survey of Asteroids, Marchis et al., 2006c)…