Related papers: A Collisional Origin to Earth's Non-chondritic Com…
Most of the properties of the Earth-Moon system can be explained by a collision between a planetary embryo and the growing Earth late in the accretion process. Simulations show that most of the material that eventually aggregates to form…
The origin of Mercury still remains poorly understood compared to the other rocky planets of the Solar System. One of the most relevant constraints that any formation model has to fulfill refers to its internal structure, with a predominant…
The composition of planets is largely determined by the chemical and dynamical evolution of the disk during planetesimal formation and growth. To predict the diversity of exoplanet compositions, previous works modeled planetesimal…
Because of the high energies involved, giant impacts that occur during planetary accretion cause large degrees of melting. The depth of melting in the target body after each collision determines the pressure and temperature conditions of…
Chondritic meteorites contain unique spherical materials named chondrules: sub-mm sized silicate grains once melted in a high temperature condition in the solar nebula. We numerically explore one of chondrule forming processes, planetesimal…
The high occurrence on Earth of ordinary chondrite meteorites and the making of models based upon arbitrary assumptions has led to some confusion about the origin of ordinary chondrites. Major element fractionation among chondrites has been…
Aspects of our Solar System's formation are deduced from observations of the chemical nature of matter. Massive cores are indicative of terrestrial-planet-composition-similarity to enstatite chondrite meteorites, whose highly-reduced state…
Planetesimal accretion during planet formation is usually treated as collisionless. Such accretion from a uniform and dynamically cold disk predicts protoplanets with slow retrograde rotation. However, if the building blocks of…
Geochemical studies of planetary accretion and evolution have invoked various degrees of collisional erosion to explain differences in bulk composition between planets and chondrites. Here we undertake a full, dynamical evaluation of…
The abundances of elements in the Earth and the terrestrial planets provide the initial conditions for life and clues as to the history and formation of the Solar System. We follow the pioneering work of Bond et al. (2010) and combine…
The nucleosynthetic isotope signatures of meteorites and the bulk silicate Earth (BSE) indicate that Earth consists of a mixture of "carbonaceous" (CC) and "non-carbonaceous" (NC) materials. We show that the fration of CC material recorded…
One of the current challenges of planet formation theory is to explain the enrichment of observed exoplanetary atmospheres. Past studies have focused on scenarios where either pebbles or planetesimals were the heavy element enrichment's…
The Mo and Ru isotopic compositions of meteorites and the bulk silicate Earth (BSE) hold important clues about the provenance of Earth's building material. Prior studies have argued that non-carbonaceous (NC) and carbonaceous (CC) meteorite…
The exoplanet mass radius diagram reveals that super Earths display a wide range of radii, and therefore mean densities, at a given mass. Using planet population synthesis models, we explore the key physical factors that shape this…
Planets and stars are expected to be compositionally linked because they accrete from the same material reservoir. However, astronomical observations revealed the existence of exoplanets whose bulk density is far higher than what is…
The bulk density of a planet, as measured by mass and radius, is a result of planet structure and composition. Relative proportions of iron core, rocky mantle, and gaseous envelopes are degenerate for a given density. This degeneracy is…
The atmosphere of a terrestrial planet that is replenished with secondary gases should have accumulated hydrogen-rich gas from its protoplanetary disk. Although a giant impact blows off a large fraction of the primordial atmosphere of a…
By plotting empirical chemical element abundances on Earth relative to the Sun and normalized to silicon versus their first ionization potentials, we confirm the existence of a correlation reported earlier. To explain this, we develop a…
The composition of rocky planets is strongly driven by the primordial materials in the protoplanetary disk, which can be inferred from the abundances of the host star. Understanding this compositional link is crucial for characterizing…
The high density of the close-in extrasolar planet HD149026b suggests the presence of a huge core in the planet, which challenges planet formation theory. We first derive constraints on the amount of heavy elements and hydrogen/helium…