Related papers: Global Scale Impacts
Giant impacts by comets and asteroids have probably had an important influence on terrestrial biological evolution. We know of around 180 high velocity impact craters on the Earth with ages up to 2400Myr and diameters up to 300km. Some…
Shock metamorphism in ordinary chondrites allows for reconstructing impact events between asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Shock-darkening of ordinary chondrites occurs at the onset of complete shock melting of the rock (>70 GPa) or…
Numerous exoplanets with masses ranging from Earth to Neptune and radii larger than Earth have been found through observations. These planets possess atmospheres that range in mass fractions from 1% to 30%, reflecting the diversity of…
We improved the algorithm presented in Rubie et al. (2015) to model the chemical evolution of Earth driven by iron/silicate differentiation during the planet's accretion. The pressure at which the equilibration occurs during a giant impact…
An asteroid impact is a low probability event with potentially devastating consequences. The Asteroid Risk Mitigation Optimization and Research (ARMOR) software tool calculates whether a colliding asteroid experiences an airburst or surface…
The processes leading deformation and destruction of planets spiraling into the convective envelope of their host stars are described. The planet is compressed by the ram pressure, and deformed into a flattened shape for which a…
Many catastrophic events, including landslides, rockbursts, glacier breakoffs, and volcanic eruptions, are preceded by an observable acceleration phase that offers a critical window for early warning and hazard mitigation; however, the…
We discuss the effect that small fluctuations of both local anisotropy and energy density, may have on the occurrence of cracking in spherical compact objects satisfying a polytropic equation of state. A systematic scheme to bring the fluid…
<Abridged> The impact of a meteoroid onto an asteroid transfers linear and angular momentum to the larger body, which may affect its orbit and its rotational state. Here we show that the meteoroid environment of our Solar System can have an…
In this expository paper we address the question of whether, and to what extent, the cosmological expansion influences the dynamics on small scales (as compared to cosmological ones), particularly in our Solar System. We distinguish between…
Most major planetary bodies in the solar system rotate in the same direction as their orbital motion: their spin is prograde. Theoretical studies to explain the direction as well as the magnitude of the spin vector have had mixed success.…
The Kepler transit survey with follow-up spectroscopic observations has discovered numerous super-Earth sized planets and revealed intriguing features of their sizes, orbital periods, and their relations between adjacent planets. For the…
Everyday thousands of meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere. The vast majority burn up harmlessly during the descent, but the larger objects survive, occasionally experiencing intense fragmentation events, and reach the ground. These…
The deformation of rocks is associated with microcracks nucleation and propagation, i.e. damage. The accumulation of damage and its spatial localization lead to the creation of a macroscale discontinuity, so-called "fault" in geological…
There is a correlation between the components of the YORP effect of most asteroids, which drives the obliquity and spin rate of the affected bodies in a consistent pattern. This allows for a clear and unambiguous picture for how the spin…
Giant Eruptions (GEs) are episodic high-rate mass loss events that massive stars experience in the late stage of evolutions before exploding as a core-collapse supernova. If it occurs in a binary system, the companion star can accrete part…
Atmospheric mass loss is a fundamental phenomenon shaping the structure and evolution of planetary atmospheres. It can engage processes ranging from global interactions with the host star and large-scale hydrodynamic outflows to essentially…
We carry out a systematic exploration of the effect of pre-impact rotation on the outcomes of low-speed collisions between planetesimals modeled as gravitational aggregates. We use pkdgrav, a cosmology code adapted to collisional problems…
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…
Formation of terrestrial planets by agglomeration of planetesimals in protoplanetary disks sensitively depends on the velocity evolution of planetesimals. We describe a novel semi-analytical approach to the treatment of planetesimal…