Related papers: Initial Planetesimal Sizes and the Size Distributi…
The Kuiper belt includes tens of thousands of large bodies and millions of smaller objects. The main part of the belt objects is located in the annular zone between 39.4 au and 47.8 au from the Sun, the boundaries correspond to the average…
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…
The coagulation of microscopic dust into planetesimals is the first step towards planet formation. The size and shape of the growing aggregates determine the efficiency of this early growth. It has been proposed that fluffy ice aggregates…
We conducted a two-night photometric survey of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) near opposition using the wide-field Hyper Suprime-Cam instrument on the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope. The survey covered about 90 deg^2 of sky, with each field…
The existence of the Oort Comet Cloud, the Kuiper Belt, and plausible inefficiencies in planetary core formation, all suggest that there was once a residual planetesimal disk of mass 10-100 Earth-masses in the vicinity of the giant planets…
This paper shows that the inclinations of bodies captured into mean motion resonances in the Kuiper belt have remained very nearly unchanged, being only slightly increased from initial lower values by migration and/or by long-term planetary…
We consider the possibility that aeolian (wind blown) processes occur on small, 1 to 100~km diameter, planetesimals when they were embedded in the protosolar nebula. Drag from a headwind within a protostellar disk is sufficiently large to…
Ever since the very first photometric studies of Centaurs and Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) their visible color distribution has been controversial. That controversy gave rise to a prolific debate on the origin of the surface colors of these…
We present a survey for bright Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) and Centaurs, conducted at the Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) 0.9 m telescope with the KPNO 8k Mosaic CCD. The survey imaged 164 sq deg near opposition to a limiting red…
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,…
We investigate the long-term evolution of the inclinations of the known classical and resonant Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). This is partially motivated by the observed bimodal inclination distribution and by the putative physical differences…
The asteroid belt is the leftover of the original planetesimal population in the inner solar system. However, currently the asteroids have orbits with all possible values of eccentricities and inclinations compatible with long-term…
The current properties of small bodies provide important clues to their origin and history. However, how much small bodies were processed by past collisions and to what extent they retain a record of processes that took place during the…
The spatial distribution of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) in 2:1 exterior resonance with Neptune constrains that planet's migration history. Numerical simulations demonstrate that fast planetary migration generates a larger population of KBOs…
This paper considers the distribution of dust which originates in the break-up of planetesimals that are trapped in resonance with a planet. There are three grain populations with different spatial distributions: (I) large grains have the…
We present a new analysis of the currently available orbital elements for the known Kuiper belt objects. In the non-resonant, main Kuiper belt we find a statistically significant relationship between an object's absolute magnitude (H) and…
The asteroid belt is an open window on the history of the Solar System, as it preserves records of both its formation process and its secular evolution. The progenitors of the present-day asteroids formed in the Solar Nebula almost…
Terrestrial planets are thought to be the result of a vast number of gravitational interactions and collisions between smaller bodies. We use numerical simulations to show that practically identical initial conditions result in a wide array…
The growth time scales of planetary embryos and their formation process are imperative for our understanding on how planetary systems form and develop. They determine the subsequent growth mechanisms during the life stages of a…
Numerical simulations of the stochastic end stage of planet formation typically begin with a population of embryos and planetesimals that grow into planets by merging. We analyzed the impact parameters of collisions leading to the growth of…