Related papers: The Compositional Structure of the Asteroid Belt
The asteroid belt is the leftover of the original planetesimal population in the inner solar system. However, currently the asteroids have orbits with all possible values of eccentricities and inclinations compatible with long-term…
Advances in the discovery and characterization of asteroids over the past decade have revealed an unanticipated underlying structure that points to a dramatic early history of the inner Solar System. The asteroids in the main asteroid belt…
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…
The orbital structure of the asteroid belt holds a record of the Solar System's dynamical history. The current belt only contains ${\rm \sim 10^{-3}}$ Earth masses yet the asteroids' orbits are dynamically excited, with a large spread in…
The asteroid belt is a unique source of information on some of the most important questions facing solar system science. These questions include the sizes, numbers, types and orbital distributions of the planetesimals that formed the…
Asteroids and meteorites provide key evidence on the formation of planetesimals in the Solar System. Asteroids are traditionally thought to form in a bottom-up process by coagulation within a population of initially km-scale planetesimals.…
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…
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,…
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…
Asteroids formed in a dynamically quiescent disk but their orbits became gravitationally stirred enough by Jupiter to lead to high-speed collisions. As a result, many dozen large asteroids have been disrupted by impacts over the age of the…
The distribution of asteroids across the Main Belt has been studied for decades to understand the compositional distribution and what that tells us about the formation and evolution of our solar system. All-sky surveys now provide orders of…
Observations with radar, photometric and direct imaging techniques have discovered that multiple asteroid systems can be divided clearly into a handful of different morphologies, and recently, the discovery of small unbound asteroid systems…
Satellites of asteroids have been discovered in nearly every known small body population, and a remarkable aspect of the known satellites is the diversity of their properties. They tell a story of vast differences in formation and evolution…
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…
Most meteorites are fragments from recent collisions experienced in the asteroid belt. In such a hyper-velocity collision, the smaller collision partner is destroyed, whereas a crater on the asteroid is formed or it is entirely disrupted,…
Containing only a few percent the mass of the moon, the current asteroid belt is around three to four orders of magnitude smaller that its primordial mass inferred from disk models. Yet dynamical studies have shown that the asteroid belt…
An asteroid family is typically formed when a larger parent body undergoes a catastrophic collisional disruption, and as such family members are expected to show physical properties that closely trace the composition and mineralogical…
The aim of the chapter is to summarize our understanding of the compositional distribution across the different reservoirs of small bodies (main belt asteroids, giant planet trojans, irregular satellites of the giant planets, TNOs, comets).…
A considerable amount of information regarding the processes that occurred during the accretion of the early planetesimals is still present among the small bodies of our solar system. A review of our current knowledge of the density of…
The asteroid belt is an open window on the history of the Solar System, as it preserves records of both its formation process and its secular evolution. The progenitors of the present-day asteroids formed in the Solar Nebula almost…