Related papers: Eight billion asteroids in the Oort cloud

The Trojan asteroids provide a unique perspective on the history of Solar System. As a large population of small bodies, they record important gravitational interactions and dynamical evolution of the Solar System. In the past decade,…

Asteroids can be considered as sources of contamination of point sources and also sources of confusion noise, depending whether their presence is detected in the image or their flux is under the detection limit. We estimate that at low…

We propose a scenario for the formation of the Main Belt in which asteroids incorporated icy particles formed in the outer Solar Nebula. We calculate the composition of icy planetesimals formed beyond a heliocentric distance of 5 AU in the…

We present new, ice species-specific New Horizons/Alice upper gas coma production limits from the 01 Jan 2019 MU69/Arrokoth flyby of Gladstone et al. (2021) and use them to make predictions about the rarity of majority hypervolatile (CO,…

The moniker rubble pile is typically applied to all solar system bodies with Diameter between 200m and 10km - where in this size range there is an abundance of evidence that nearly every object is bound primarily by self-gravity with…

A group of newly observed extreme trans-Neptunian objects exhibit unexpected orbital confinement, characterized by the alignment of orbital angular momentum vectors and apsidal lines. It is proposed that an undiscovered giant planet, named…

Fifteen orbital clusters (associations) were identified among ~20000 near Earth asteroids (NEAs). All associations were found with a high statistical reliability using a single linkage cluster analysis algorithm and three orbital similarity…

Collisions are one of the key processes shaping planetary systems. Asteroid families are outcomes of such collisions still identifiable across our solar system. The families provide a unique view of catastrophic disruption phenomena and…

The solar system was most likely born in a star cluster containing at least 1000 stars. It is highly probable that this cluster environment influenced various properties of the solar system like its chemical composition, size and the…

Periodic comets of different dynamical groups with orbits at 2 - 5 AU still occasionally active. The observed dust activity of such objects can be connected with processes of water ice sublimation (MBCs) or crystallization of amorphous…

In its 16 years of scientific measurements, the Spitzer Space Telescope performed a number of ground-breaking infrared measurements of Solar System objects. In this second of two papers, we describe results from Spitzer observations of…

A detailed study of comets active at large heliocentric distances (greater than 4 au) which enter the Solar System for the first time and are composed of matter in its elementary, unprocessed state, would help in our understanding of the…

We analyse the origin of three Centaurs with perihelia in the range 15 AU to 30 AU, inclinations above 70 deg and semi-major axes shorter than 100 AU. Based on long-term numerical simulations we conclude that these objects most likely…

Here we show an example of a young asteroid cluster located in a dynamically stable region, which was produced by partial disruption of a primitive body about 30 km in size. We estimate its age to be only 1.9 +/- 0.3 Myr, thus its…

While of order a million asteroids have been discovered, the number in rigorously controlled samples that have precise orbits and rotation periods, as well as well-measured colors, is relatively small. In particular, less than a dozen…

To date only very few meteor clusters have been instrumentally recorded. This means that every new detection is an important contribution to the understanding of these phenomena, which are thought to be evidence of the meteoroid…

Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their…

We use numerical N-body simulations of the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC) to investigate the destruction of protoplanetary disks by close stellar encounters and UV radiation from massive stars. The simulations model a cluster of 4000 stars, and…

The population of the Kuiper Belt within 50 AU of the Sun has likely been severely depleted by gravitational perturbations from the giant planets, particularly Neptune. The density of Kuiper Belt objects is expected to be two orders of…

Since 1950 when Oort published his paper on the structure of the cloud of comets it is believed that stars passing near this hypothetical cometary reservoir play an important role in the dynamical evolution of long period comets and…