Related papers: Impact cratering on Mercury: consequences for the …
The inner asteroid belt between 2.1 and 2.5 au is of particular dynamical significance because it is the dominant source of both chondritic meteorites and near-Earth asteroids. This inner belt is bounded by an eccentricity-type secular…
Main-belt asteroids have been continuously colliding with one another since they were formed. Its size distribution is primarily determined by the size dependence of asteroid strength against catastrophic impacts. The strength scaling law…
Impactors of different types and sizes can produce a final crater of the same diameter on a planet under certain conditions. We derive the condition for such "isocrater impacts" from scaling laws, as well as relations that describe how the…
Intense bombardment of solar system planets in the immediate aftermath of protoplanetary disk dissipation has played a key role in their atmospheric evolution. During this epoch, energetic collisions will have removed significant masses of…
The widely-separated, near-equal mass binaries hosted by the cold Classical Kuiper Belt are delicately bound and subject to disruption by many perturbing processes. We use analytical arguments and numerical simulations to determine their…
Giant impacts by comets and asteroids have probably had an important influence on terrestrial biological evolution. We know of around 180 high velocity impact craters on the Earth with ages up to 2400Myr and diameters up to 300km. Some…
Of the solar system's four terrestrial planets, the origin of Mercury is perhaps the most mysterious. Modern numerical simulations designed to model the dynamics of terrestrial planet formation systematically fail to replicate Mercury;…
While it is accepted that the eccentricity of Mercury (0.206) favours entrapment into the 3:2 spin-orbit resonance, open is the question how and when the capture took place. A recent work by Makarov (2012) has demonstrated that trapping…
We infer the crater chronologies of Ceres and Vesta from a self-consistent dynamical model of asteroid impactors. The model accounts for planetary migration/instability early in the solar system history and tracks asteroid orbits over 4.56…
This HDR-thesis is devoted to the study of the rotation of the natural satellites of the giant planets and of Mercury. These bodies have a resonant rotation. Most of the natural satellites rotate synchronously, showing the same hemisphere…
The final stage of planet formation is dominated by collisions between planetary embryos. The dynamics of this stage determine the orbital configuration and the mass and composition of planets in the system. In the solar system, late giant…
We provide a fast method for computing constraints on impactor pre-impact orbits, applying this to the late giant impacts in the Solar System. These constraints can be used to make quick, broad comparisons of different collision scenarios,…
We present new models for the rotational evolution of solar-like stars between 1 Myr and 10 Gyr with the aim to reproduce the distributions of rotational periods observed for star forming regions and young open clusters within this age…
About 10% of the observed asteroids have rotational periods lower than P = 3 h and they seem to be relatively close to the spin barrier. Yet, the rotation has often been neglected in simulations of asteroid collisions. To determine the…
Most meteorites are fragments from recent collisions experienced in the asteroid belt. In such a hyper-velocity collision, the smaller collision partner is destroyed, whereas a crater on the asteroid is formed or it is entirely disrupted,…
The population of Earth-impacting meteoroids and its size-dependent orbital elements are key to understanding the origin of meteorites and informing on planetary defence efforts. Outstanding questions include the role of collisions in…
There is increasing evidence that many km-sized bodies in the Solar System are piles of rubble bound together by gravity. We present results from a project to map the parameter space of collisions between km-sized spherical rubble piles.…
We have evaluated the rate at which the asteroid belt is losing material, and how it splits between macroscopic bodies and meteoritic dust. The mass loss process is due to the injection of asteroid fragments into unstable dynamical regions,…
Two dedicated asteroid rotation-period surveys have been carried out using data taken on January 6-9 and February 20-23 of 2014 by the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) in the $R$~band with $\sim 20$-min cadence. The total…
We perform a suite of smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to investigate in detail the results of a giant impact on the young Uranus. We study the internal structure, rotation rate, and atmospheric retention of the post-impact…