Related papers: Hyperbolic meteors: interstellar or generated loca…
The physical composition and structure of meteoroids gives us insight into the formation processes of their parent asteroids and comets. The strength of and fundamental grain sizes in meteoroids tell us about the environment in which small…
We modeled the trajectories of material ejected from 20 nearby debris disk stars, including Epsilon Eridani (Ran), Vega, Fomalhaut, and Beta Pictoris, within a simulated Milky Way potential in order to quantify their contribution to the…
The observation of interstellar objects 1I/'Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov suggests the existence of a larger population of smaller projectiles that impact our planet with unbound orbits. We analyze an asteroidal grazing meteor (FH1) recorded by…
Exoplanet surveys have confirmed one of humanity's (and all teenagers') worst fears: we are weird. If our Solar System were observed with present-day Earth technology -- to put our system and exoplanets on the same footing -- Jupiter is the…
Collimated outflows (jets) are ubiquitous in the universe appearing around sources as diverse as protostars and extragalactic supermassive blackholes. Jets are thought to be magnetically collimated, and launched from a magnetized accretion…
Hypervelocity binaries (HVBs) can be produced by a close encounter between stellar binaries and supermassive black hole (SMBH)-intermediate massive black hole (IMBH) binaries. We perform scattering experiments between tight stellar binaries…
Understanding the star formation process is central to much of modern astrophysics. For several decades it has been thought that stellar birth is primarily controlled by the interplay between gravity and magnetostatic support, modulated by…
The solar system is dusty, and would become dustier over time as asteroids collide and comets disintegrate, except that small debris particles in interplanetary space do not last long. They can be ejected from the solar system by Jupiter,…
With orbital periods longer than 200 years, most long-period comets (LPCs) remain undiscovered until they are in-bound towards perihelion. The comets that pass close to Earth's orbit are Potentially Hazardous Objects (PHOs). Those with…
Earth occasionally crosses the debris streams produced by comets and other active bodies in our solar system. These manifest meteor showers that provide an opportunity to explore these bodies without a need to visit them in-situ.…
All the four giant planets in our Solar System have rings, but their characteristics are very different. The rings consist of a number of small particles, although individual particles have not been directly imaged. Near the central planet,…
A meteor shower is a luminous phenomenon that takes place by the entry into the Earths atmosphere of a cascade of particles coming from a stream intersected by our planet in its orbit. Here we investigate the possibility of a description of…
In this paper we address the question whether star formation is driven by local processes or the large scale environment. To do so, we investigate star formation in collisional debris where the gravitational potential well and velocity…
Stardust grains recovered from meteorites provide high-precision snapshots of the isotopic composition of the stellar environment in which they formed. Attributing their origin to specific types of stars, however, often proves difficult.…
Understanding the origin of comets requires knowledge of how the Solar System formed from a cloud of dust and gas 4.567 Gyr ago. Here, a review is presented of how the remnants of this formation process, meteorites and to a lesser extent…
Recent observations have revealed massive galactic molecular outflows that may have physical conditions (high gas densities) required to form stars. Indeed, several recent models predict that such massive galactic outflows may ignite star…
Several tens of hyper-velocity stars (HVSs) have been discovered escaping our Galaxy. These stars share a common origin in the Galactic centre and are distributed anisotropically in Galactic longitude and latitude. We examine the…
The local detection rate of interstellar objects can allow for estimations of the total number of similar objects bound by the Milky Way thin disk. If interstellar objects of artificial origin are discovered, the estimated total number of…
In 2019 a claim was made that the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor is interstellar. However, apparent interstellar meteors have been detected for decades. Moreover, they are expected from any meteor observation survey, as a natural consequence of…
The under-abundance of asteroids on orbits with small perihelion distances suggests that thermally-driven disruption may be an important process in the removal of rocky bodies in the Solar System. Here we report our study of how the debris…