Related papers: Eight billion asteroids in the Oort cloud
We study the evolution of long-period comets by numerical integration of their orbits, following comets from their origin in the Oort cloud until their final escape or destruction, in a model solar system consisting of the Sun, the four…
Using numerical simulations, we examine the structure of a cometary population near a massive planet, such as a giant planet of the Solar system, starting with one-planet approximation (the Sun plus one planet). By studying the…
Many asteroids show indications they have undergone impacts with meteoroid particles having radii between 0.01 m and 1 m. During such impacts, small dust grains will be ejected at the impact site. The possibility of these dust grains (with…
The physical basis of chaos in the solar system is now better understood: in all cases investigated so far, chaotic orbits result from overlapping resonances. Perhaps the clearest examples are found in the asteroid belt. Overlapping…
We examine the possibility that gamma-ray bursts arise from sources in the Oort comet cloud, basing most of our arguments on accepted models for the formation and spatial distribution of the cloud. We identify three severe problems with…
The spatial morphology and dynamical status of a young, still-forming stellar cluster provide valuable clues on the conditions during the star formation event and the processes that regulated it. We analyze the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC),…
Recent surveys of star forming regions have shown that most stars, and probably all massive stars, are born in dense stellar clusters. The mechanism by which a molecular cloud fragments to form several hundred to thousands of individual…
The longitudes of perihelia and orbital poles of the solar system's dozen or so most remote detected objects are clustered in a manner inconsistent with that of a random sample of uniformly distributed orbits. While small number statistics…
The formation of the Inner Oort Cloud (IOC) - a vast halo of icy bodies residing far beyond Neptune's orbit - is an expected outcome of the solar system's primordial evolution within a stellar cluster. Recent models have shown that the…
We derived 90% confidence limits (CL) on the interstellar number density ($\rho_{IS}^{CL}$) of interstellar objects (ISO; comets and asteroids) as a function of the slope of their size-frequency distribution and limiting absolute magnitude.…
We investigate cloud-cloud collisions, and GMC evolution, in hydrodynamic simulations of isolated galaxies. The simulations include heating and cooling of the ISM, self--gravity and stellar feedback. Over timescales $<5$ Myr most clouds…
The asteroid belt was dynamically shaped during and after planet formation. Despite representing a broad ring of stable orbits, the belt contains less than one one-thousandth of an Earth mass. The asteroid orbits are dynamically excited…
General properties of the Orion star-forming region are discussed, with a focus on the dense Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC). This cluster contains between 2500 and 4500 objects located within a few parsecs of the eponymous Trapezium stars. Its…
The catalog of km-sized near-Earth objects (NEOs) is nearly complete. Typical impact monitoring analyses search for possible impacts over the next 100 years and none of the km-sized objects represent an impact threat over that time…
Outer satellites of the planets have distant, eccentric orbits that can be highly inclined or even retrograde relative to the equatorial planes of their planets. These irregular orbits cannot have formed by circumplanetary accretion and are…
Among the outer solar system minor planet orbits there is an observed gap in perihelion between roughly 50 and 65 au at eccentricities $e\gtrsim0.65$. Through a suite of observational simulations, we show that the gap arises from two…
The practical distinctions between asteroids and comets, viewed as products of accretion on either side of the snow line, are less clear-cut than previously understood. In this chapter, we discuss the numerous solar system populations which…
We estimated the rate of comet and asteroid collisions with the terrestrial planets by calculating the orbits of 13000 Jupiter-crossing objects (JCOs) and 1300 resonant asteroids and computing the probabilities of collisions based on…
As long as there is no distance indicator to the sources of gamma-ray bursts all possible sources which are isotropically distributed should remain under consideration. This is why the Oort cloud of comets is kept on the list. We use the…
Asteroid modeling efforts in the last decade resulted in a comprehensive dataset of almost 400 convex shape models and their rotation states. This amount already provided a deep insight into physical properties of main-belt asteroids or…