Related papers: Boulders on asteroid Toutatis as observed by Chang…
Cosmic collisions on planets cause detectable optical flashes that range from terrestrial shooting stars to bright fireballs. On June 3, 2010 a bolide in Jupiter's atmosphere was simultaneously observed from the Earth by two amateur…
The recent years have witnessed a carnival of discoveries in the Outer Solar System. Here we provide evidence from numerical simulations of orbital stability to suggest the possible existence of two long lived belts of primordial…
The last several years have brought about a dynamic shift in the view of exoplanetary systems in the post-main sequence, perhaps epitomized by the evidence for surviving rocky planetary bodies at white dwarfs. Coinciding with the launch of…
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…
The Hyades is the nearest open cluster, relatively young and containing numerous A-type stars; its known age, distance, and metallicity make it an ideal site to study planetary systems around 2-3 Msun stars at an epoch similar to the late…
The dynamical and physical properties of asteroid family members are widely used to reconstruct the collisional evolution of the main belt and of individual objects. Families offer insights into the properties of the parent bodies and the…
Low-albedo asteroids preserve a record of the primordial solar system planetesimals and the conditions in which the solar nebula was active. However, the origin and evolution of these asteroids are not well-constrained. Here we measured…
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…
Here we show an example of a young asteroid cluster located in a dynamically stable region, which was produced by partial disruption of a primitive body about 30 km in size. We estimate its age to be only 1.9 +/- 0.3 Myr, thus its…
Boulders, rocks and regolith on fast rotating asteroids (<2.5 hours) are modeled to slide towards the equator due to a strong centrifugal force and a low cohesion force. As a result, regions of fresh subsurface material can be exposed.…
Analysis of laboratory experiments simulating space weathering optical effects on atmosphereless planetary bodies reveals that the time needed to alter the spectrum of an ordinary chondrite meteorite to resemble the overall spectral shape…
Context. Rotational instability of rubble-pile asteroids can trigger mass shedding, forming transient debris clouds that may provide the initial conditions for secondary formation in binary systems. Aims. We investigate the dynamical and…
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…
Pluto and its satellites will be the most distant objects ever reconnoitered when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft conducts its intensive flyby of this system in 2015. The size-frequency distribution (SFD) of craters on the surfaces in the…
Asteroid collisions are one of the main processes responsible for the evolution of bodies in the main belt. Using observations of the Dimorphos impact by the DART spacecraft, we estimate how asteroid collisions in the main belt may look in…
More than a half of asteroids in the main belt have irregular shapes with the ratios of the minor to major axis lengths less than 0.6. One of the mechanisms to create such shapes is collisions between asteroids. The relationship between…
Centaurs are objects whose orbits are found between those of the giant planets. They are supposed to originate mainly from the TransNeptunian objects, and they are among the sources of NearEarth Objects.TransNeptunian Objects (TNOs) cross…
Recently published crater statistics on the small asteroids 25143 Itokawa and 433 Eros show a significant depletion of craters below approx. 100 m in diameter. Possible mechanisms that were brought up to explain this lack of craters were…
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…
Recent observations (Burnes2002,Veillet2002,Margot2002a) have revealed an unexpectedly high binary fraction among the Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) that populate the Kuiper Belt. The TNO binaries are strikingly different from asteroid…