Related papers: The Compositional Structure of the Asteroid Belt
Our current knowledge of the dynamical structure of the Kuiper Belt is reviewed here. Numerical results on long term orbital evolution and dynamical mechanisms underlying the transport of objects out of the Kuiper Belt are discussed.…
Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar System's Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is…
The small bodies in the Kuiper Belt region of the distant Solar System are leftovers from planet formation. Their orbital distribution today tells us about how giant planets migrated, while their surface properties, shapes, and sizes tell…
Asteroid diameters are traditionally difficult to estimate. When a direct measurement of the diameter cannot be made through either occultation or direct radar observation, the most common method is to approximate the diameter from infrared…
Asteroid photometry has three major applications: providing clues about asteroid surface physical properties and compositions, facilitating photometric corrections, and helping design and plan ground-based and spacecraft observations. The…
Volatile compositions of asteroids provide information on the Solar System history and the origins of Earth's volatiles. Visible to near-infrared observations at wavelengths of $<2.5\ {\rm \mu m}$ have suggested a genetic link between outer…
Asteroids are classified as tiny and light objects in the solar system, however some of them possess orbiting moons. According to surveys, 15% of near-earth asteroids have moons. The Electrical Discharge effect provides a new model that…
Although petrologic, chemical and isotopic studies of ordinary chondrites and meteorites in general have largely helped establish a chronology of the earliest events of planetesimal formation and their evolution, there are several questions…
A statistical analysis of brightness variability of asteroids reveals how their shapes evolve from elongated to rough spheroidal forms, presumably driven by impact-related phenomena. Based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object…
Asteroid families are formed as the result of collisions. Large fragments are ejected with speeds of the order of the escape velocity from the parent body. After the family formation, the fragments' orbits evolve in the space of proper…
Asteroids and comets are remnants from the era of Solar System formation over 4.5 billion years ago, and therefore allow us to address two fundamental questions in astronomy: what was the nature of our protoplanetary disk, and how did the…
The main belt, the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is home to more than 1 million asteroids. These asteroids form orbital groups, (i.e., asteroid families formed by collisions) and also spectral groups (taxonomies) with…
A new family classification, based on a catalog of proper elements with $\sim 384,000$ numbered asteroids and on new methods is available. For the $45$ dynamical families with $>250$ members identified in this classification, we present an…
In the last decade, thanks to the development of sophisticated numerical codes, major breakthroughs have been achieved in our understanding of the formation of asteroid families by catastrophic disruption of large parent bodies. In this…
The cumulative effects of weak resonant and secular perturbations by the major planets produce chaotic behavior of asteroids on long timescales. Dynamical chaos is the dominant loss mechanism for asteroids with diameters D > 10 km in the…
The proper elements of asteroids are obtained from the instantaneous orbital elements by removing periodic oscillations produced by gravitational interactions with planets. They are unchanging in time, at least if chaotic dynamics and…
Planetesimal belts are ubiquitous around nearby stars, and their spatial properties hold crucial information for planetesimal and planet formation models. We present resolved dust observations of 74 planetary systems as part of the REsolved…
Recent observations indicate that >99% of the small bodies in the Solar System reside in its outer reaches --- in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Kuiper Belt bodies are probably the best preserved representatives of the icy planetesimals…
This chapter summarizes analytic theory and numerical calculations for the formation and collisional evolution of KBOs at 20--150 AU. We describe the main predictions of a baseline self-stirring model and show how dynamical perturbations…
Observational advances over the last decade have enabled high-resolution, interferometric studies of forming multiple systems, statistical surveys of multiplicity in star-forming regions, and new insights into disk evolution and planetary…