Related papers: Active Asteroids: Main-Belt Comets and Disrupted A…

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 majority of basaltic objects in the main belt are dynamically connected to Vesta, the largest differentiated asteroid known. Others, due to their current orbital parameters, cannot be easily dynamically linked to Vesta. This is…

Solicited by the Small Bodies Assessment Group, we recommend a balanced program of telescopic observation (ground-based, airborne, and space-based), laboratory studies, theoretical research and missions to Main Belt Asteroids utilizing the…

Main sequence stars, like the Sun, are often found to be orbited by circumstellar material that can be categorized into two groups, planets and debris. The latter is made up of asteroids and comets, as well as the dust and gas derived from…

We revisited a mass ejection phenomenon that occurred in asteroid P/2010 A2 in terms of the dynamical properties of the dust particles and large fragments. We constructed a model assuming anisotropic ejection within a solid cone-shaped jet…

The main asteroid belt (MB) is low in mass but dynamically excited. Here we propose a new mechanism to excite the MB during the giant planet ('Nice model') instability, which is expected to have featured repeated close encounters between…

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.…

Recent dynamical studies have identified pairs of asteroids that reside in nearly identical heliocentric orbits. Possible formation scenarios for these systems include dissociation of binary asteroids, collisional disruption of a single…

Mean motion resonances play a fundamental role in the dynamics of the small bodies of the Solar System. The last decades of the 20th century gave us a detailed description of the dynamics as well as the process of capture of small bodies in…

Observations of active asteroid P/2017 S5 when near perihelion reveal the ejection of large (0.1 to 10 mm) particles at 0.2 to 2 m/s speeds, with estimated mass-loss rates of a few kg/s. The protracted nature of the mass loss (continuous…

P/2010 A2 is an object on an asteroidal orbit that was observed to have an extended tail or debris trail in January 2010. In this work, we fit the outburst of P/2010 A2 with a conical burst model, and verify previous suspicions that this…

We present observations and a dynamical analysis of the comet-like main-belt object, (596) Scheila. V-band photometry obtained on UT 2010 December 12 indicates that Scheila's dust cloud has a scattering cross-section ~1.4 times larger than…

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…

C-complex asteroids, rich in carbonaceous materials, are potential sources of Earth's volatile inventories. They are spectrally dark resembling primitive carbonaceous meteorites, and thus, C-complex asteroids are thought to be potential…

Hubble Space Telescope observations of main-belt comet P/2013 P5 reveal an extraordinary system of six dust tails that distinguish this object from any other. Observations two weeks apart show dramatic morphological change in the tails…

We examine the motions of large fragments at the head of the dust tail of active asteroid P/2010 A2. In previous work we showed that these fragments were ejected from the primary nucleus in early 2009, either following a hypervelocity…

Even though the orbital motions of most long-period comets are found to comply with the gravitational law, a rapidly increasing minority of these objects is found to display detectable outgassing-driven deviations. The systematic research…

The $\delta$-Cancrid meteoroid stream forms four active meteor showers which are observable on the Earth annually during January-February and August-September. The stream's definite parent comet has not been established. We performed a…

We present new imaging polarimetric observations of two Main Belt asteroids, (234) Barbara and (387) Aquitania, taken in the first half of 2008 using the Dual-Beam Imaging Polarimeter on the University of Hawaii 2.2 meter telescope, located…

Here, we continue this research with a detailed study of their past and future motion during previous and next orbital periods under the perturbing action of our Galactic environment. At all stages of our dynamical study, we precisely…