Related papers: The Changing Perception of the Solar System
Although the discovery of the chaotic motion of the inner planets in the solar system dates back to more than thirty years ago, the secular chaos of their orbits still dares more analytical analyses. Apart from the high-dimensional…
Star formation is a multi-scale, multi-physics problem ranging from the size scale of molecular clouds ($\sim$10s pc) down to the size scales of dense prestellar cores ($\sim$0.1 pc) that are the birth sites of stars. Several physical…
Our Solar System includes the Sun, eight major planets and their moons, along with numerous asteroids, comets, and dust particles, collectively known as the small Solar System bodies. Small bodies are relics from the birth of the Solar…
Modern cosmological simulations predict that the first generation of stars formed with a mass scale around 100 solar masses about 300-400 million years after the Big Bang. When the first stars reached the end of their lives, many of them…
The past 15 years have brought about a revolution in our understanding of our Solar System and other planetary systems. During this time, discoveries include the first Kuiper Belt Objects, the first brown dwarfs, and the first extra-solar…
This chapter presents a (partial) review of the information we can derive on the early history of the Solar System from radioactive nuclei of very different half-life, which were recognized to have been present alive in pristine solids. In…
Orbital resonances are ubiquitous in the Solar system. They play a decisive role in the long term dynamics, and in some cases the physical evolution, of the planets and of their natural satellites, as well as the evolution of small bodies…
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…
Our understanding of planet formation has been rapidly evolving in recent years. The classical planet formation theory, developed when the only known planetary system was our own Solar System, has been revised to account for the observed…
Despite the discovery of thousands of exoplanets in recent years, the number of known exoplanets in star clusters remains tiny. This may be a consequence of close stellar encounters perturbing the dynamical evolution of planetary systems in…
Nearly 30 years after the discovery of the first exoplanet around a main sequence star, thousands of planets have now been confirmed. These discoveries have completely revolutionized our understanding of planetary systems, revealing types…
This is a historian's view of how modern astronomy data can be used to discuss the shifting historical worldview of Late Antiquity. In this article an attemp is made to construct an approximate model of how the cycles of astronomical…
We discuss problems of planetesimal migration in the emerging Solar System and exoplanetary systems. Protoplanetary disk evolution models and the formation of planets are considered. The formation of the Moon and of the asteroid and…
The early gas-dust solar nebula is considered: the gasdynamic theory is used to study the gravitational Jeans-type instability in its protoplanetary disk. The implications for the origin of the solar system are discussed. It is shown that a…
Although sunspots have been systematically observed on the Sun's surface over the last four centuries, their magnetic properties have been revealed and documented only since the early 1900s. Sunspots typically appear in pairs of opposite…
In the coming years, it is likely that the first potentially Earth-like planets will be discovered orbiting other stars. Once found, the characterisation of those planets will play a vital role in determining which will be chosen as the…
The last few years witnessed a change of perspective in the context of galaxy formation and evolution. The major role played by bars in the history of these fundamental building blocks of our universe was finally realized. However, and…
Recent precise observations of solar global parameters are used to calibrate an upgraded solar model which takes into account magnetic fields in the solar interior. Historical data about sunspot numbers (from 1500 to the present) and solar…
After decades of effort, the solar activity cycle is exceptionally well characterized but it remains poorly understood. Pioneering work at the Mount Wilson Observatory demonstrated that other sun-like stars also show regular activity…
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…