Related papers: The Active Asteroids
The eccentric orbits of the known extrasolar giant planets provide evidence that most planet-forming environments undergo violent dynamical instabilities. Here, we numerically simulate the impact of giant planet instabilities on planetary…
Small bodies are capable of delivering essential prerequisites for the development of life, such as volatiles and organics, to the terrestrial planets. For example, empirical evidence suggests that water was delivered to the Earth by…
The discovery of Main Belt Comets (MBCs) has raised many questions regarding the origin and activation mechanism of these objects. Results of a study of the dynamics of these bodies suggest that MBCs were formed in-situ as the remnants of…
It is known, from observational data recorded from airbursts, that small asteroids breakup at dynamical pressures lower than their mechanical strength. This means that actual theoretical models are inconsistent with observations. In this…
In the past decade, the number of known binary near-Earth asteroids has more than quadrupled and the number of known large main belt asteroids with satellites has doubled. Half a dozen triple asteroids have been discovered, and the…
When comet nuclei approach the Sun, the increasing energy flux through the surface layers leads to sublimation of the underlying ices and subsequent outgassing that promotes the observed emission of gas and dust. The ejection of dust…
The active asteroid 311P is one of the two targets of a planned Chinese asteroid exploration mission Tianwen-2. During 2013, 311P experienced several mass-loss events and exhibited multiple comet-like tails. Here we analyze the morphology…
Comets contain abundant amounts of organic and inorganic species. Many of the volatile molecules in comets have also been observed in the interstellar medium and some of them even with similar relative abundances, indicating formation under…
Most main-belt asteroids are primitive rock and metal bodies in orbit about the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Disruption, through high velocity collisions or rotational spin-up, is believed to be the primary mechanism for the production and…
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…
Asteroid pairs sharing similar heliocentric orbits were found recently. Backward integrations of their orbits indicated that they separated gently with low relative velocities, but did not provide additional insight into their formation…
We have made an extensive search for grouping amongst the near Earth asteroids (NEAs). We used two D- functions and rigorous cluster analysis approach. We have found sev- eral new groups (associations) among the NEAs: the objects moving on…
Satellites around large asteroids are preferentially found among those with the most rapid rotation and elongated shape. The taxonomic statistics are similarly skewed; in total, 13 asteroids larger than 100 km are known to have satellites,…
Rotationally fissioned asteroids produce unbound daughter asteroids that have very similar heliocentric orbits. Backward integration of their current heliocentric orbits provides an age of closest proximity that can be used to date the…
A set of 50,000 artificial Earth impacting asteroids was used to obtain, for the first time, information about the dominance of individual impact effects such as wind blast, overpressure shock, thermal radiation, cratering, seismic shaking,…
The Oort cloud is usually thought of as a collection of icy comets inhabiting the outer reaches of the Solar system, but this picture is incomplete. We use simulations of the formation of the Oort cloud to show that ~4% of the small bodies…
Every second millions of small meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere producing dense plasmas. Radars easily detect these plasmas and researchers use this data to characterize both the meteoroids and the atmosphere. This paper develops a…
The origin of Mars's small moons, Phobos and Deimos, remains unknown. They are typically thought either to be captured asteroids or to have accreted from a debris disk produced by a giant impact. Here, we present an alternative scenario…
Remote investigations of the ancient solar system matter has been traditionally carried out through the observations of long-period (LP) comets that are less affected by solar irradiation than the short-period counterparts orbiting much…
Ejection of large boulder-like debris is a vigorous form of cometary activity that is unlikely induced by water ice out-gassing alone but rather associated with the sublimation of super-volatile ices. Though perceived on several comets,…