Related papers: Recent multi-kiloton impact events: are they truly…

Numerous decameter-sized asteroids have been observed impacting Earth as fireballs. These objects can have impact energies equivalent to hundreds of kilotons of TNT, posing a hazard if they impact populated areas. Previous estimates of…

Statistical physics and dynamical systems theory are key tools to study high-impact geophysical events such as temperature extremes, cyclones, thunderstorms, geomagnetic storms and many more. Despite the intrinsic differences between these…

Some risks have extremely high stakes. For example, a worldwide pandemic or asteroid impact could potentially kill more than a billion people. Comfortingly, scientific calculations often put very low probabilities on the occurrence of such…

The origin of fast radio bursts (FRBs) is still a mystery. One model proposed to interpret the only known repeating object, FRB 121102, is that the radio emission is generated from asteroids colliding with a highly magnetized neutron star…

Numerous Earth-destroying doomsday scenarios have recently been analyzed, including breakdown of a metastable vacuum state and planetary destruction triggered by a "strangelet'' or microscopic black hole. We point out that many previous…

We report 491 new near-infrared spectroscopic measurements of 420 near-Earth objects (NEOs) collected on the NASA InfraRed Telescope Facility (IRTF) as part of the MIT-Hawaii NEO Spectroscopic Survey (MITHNEOS). These measurements were…

Cosmic radiation backgrounds are a constraint on life, and their distribution will affect the Galactic Habitable Zone. Life on Earth has developed in the context of these backgrounds, and characterizing event rates will elaborate the…

Imminent impactors are natural bodies discovered in space before impacting the Earth. They provide a rare opportunity to characterize individual near-Earth objects (NEOs) in great detail as asteroids in space, meteors in Earth's atmosphere…

Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) is a major survey of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs). In a recent work, we used CSS observations from 2005-2012 to develop a new population model of NEOs (NEOMOD). CSS's G96 telescope was upgraded in 2016 and detected…

Frequency-magnitude distributions, and their associated uncertainties, are of key importance in statistical seismology. When fitting these distributions, the assumption of Gaussian residuals is invalid since event numbers are both discrete…

Micrometeoroid or space debris impacts have been observed in the focal planes of the XMM-Newton and Swift-XRT X-ray observatories. These impacts have resulted in damage to, and in one case the failure of, focal-plane Charge-Coupled Device…

We investigate numerically the dynamical evolution of simulated meteoroid stream of the Quadrantids ejected from the parent body of the asteroid (196256) 2003 EH1. The main goal of this work is to identify mean motion and secular resonances…

Meteoroids impacting the Earth on a daily basis are fragments of asteroids and comets. By studying fireballs produced during their disintegration in the atmosphere, we can gain information about their source regions and the properties of…

Extreme events are unusual and rare large-amplitude fluctuations that occur can unexpectedly in nonlinear dynamical systems. Events above the extreme event threshold of the probability distribution of a nonlinear process characterize…

We seek evidence of the Yarkovsky effect among Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) by measuring the Yarkovsky-related orbital drift from the orbital fit. To prevent the occurrence of unreliable detections we employ a high precision dynamical model,…

Tornadoes are severe weather phenomena characterized by a violently rotating column of air connecting the ground to a parent storm. Within the United States, hundreds of tornadoes occur every year. Despite this, the dynamics of tornado…

Robust impact monitoring of near-Earth objects is an essential task of planetary defense. Current systems such as NASA's Sentry-II, the University of Pisa's CLOMON2, and ESA's Aegis have been highly successful, but independent approaches…

A framework for the theoretical and analytical understanding of the impact crater-size frequency distribution is developed and applied to observed data from Mars and Earth. The analitical model derived gives the crater population,N, as a…

Our previous model (NEOMOD2) for the orbital and absolute magnitude distribution of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) was calibrated on the Catalina Sky Survey observations between 2013 and 2022. Here we extend NEOMOD2 to include visible albedo…

This paper presents the results of a nearly two year long campaign to detect and analyze meteor persistent trains (PTs) - self-emitting phenomena which can linger up to an hour after their parent meteor. The modern understanding of PTs has…