Related papers: Crustal Failure on Icy Moons from a Strong Tidal E…
In 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto and its moon Charon, providing the first clear look at the surface of Charon. New Horizons images revealed an ancient surface, a large, intricate canyon system, and many fractures, among…
The solar system's dynamical state can be explained by an orbital instability among the giant planets. A recent model has proposed that the giant planet instability happened during terrestrial planet formation. This scenario has been shown…
We investigate the outcome of collisions of Ceres-sized planetesimals composed of a rocky core and a shell of water ice. These collisions are not only relevant for explaining the formation of planetary embryos in early planetary systems,…
We formulated tidal decay lifetimes for hypothetical moons orbiting extrasolar planets with both lunar and stellar tides. Previous work neglected the effect of lunar tides on planet rotation, and are therefore applicable only to systems in…
We build a conceptual coupled model of the climate and tidal evolution of the Earth-Moon system to find the influence of the former on the latter. An energy balance model is applied to calculate steady-state temperature field from the mean…
Centaurs are minor planets orbiting between Jupiter and Neptune that have or had crossing orbits with one or more giant planets. Recent observations and reinterpretation of previous observations have revealed the existence of ring systems…
Low-mass stars appear to frequently host planetary systems. When these rocky planets develop high eccentricities as a result of secular torques or dynamical scatterings, they occasionally pass close to the host star. In these close…
Stars grazing supermassive black holes on bound orbits may produce periodic flares over many passages, known as repeating partial tidal disruption events (TDEs). Here, we present 3D hydrodynamic simulations of sun-like stars over multiple…
Europa's surface exhibits many regions of complex topography termed 'chaos terrains'. One set of hypotheses for chaos terrain formation requires upward migration of liquid water from perched water bodies within the icy shell formed by…
We present results from a suite of N-body simulations that follow the accretion history of the terrestrial planets using a new parallel treecode that we have developed. We initially place 2000 equal size planetesimals between 0.5--4.0 AU…
The existence of giant planets on wide orbits ($\stackrel{>}{_\sim}100$AU) challenge planet formation theories; the core accretion scenario has difficulty in forming them, whereas the disc instability model forms an overabundance of them…
Giant planets are believed to host central dense rocky/icy cores that are key actors in the core-accretion scenario for their formation. In the same time, some of their components are unstable in the temperature and pressure regimes of…
Tidal interactions between moons and planets can have major effects on the orbits, spins, and thermal evolution of the moons. In the Saturn system, tidal dissipation in the planet transfers angular momentum from Saturn to the moons, causing…
The hypothesis of lunar origin by a single giant impact can explain some aspects of the Earth-Moon system. However, it is difficult to reconcile giant impact models with the compositional similarity of the Earth and Moon without violating…
We make use of a new hybrid method to simulate the long-term, multiple-orbit disc formation through tidal disruptions of rocky bodies by white dwarfs, at high-resolution and realistic semi-major axis. We perform the largest-yet suite of…
Until recently, most asteroids were thought to be solid bodies whose shapes were determined largely by collisions with other asteroids. It now seems that many asteroids are little more than rubble piles, held together by self-gravity; this…
Almost all the planets of our solar system have moons. Each planetary system has however unique characteristics. The Martian system has not one single big moon like the Earth, not tens of moons of various sizes like for the giant planets,…
(abbreviated) We extend the theory of close encounters of a planet on a parabolic orbit with a star to include the effects of tides induced on the central rotating star. Orbits with arbitrary inclination to the stellar rotation axis are…
We discuss dynamical friction in an $N$-body system in the presence of tidal interactions caused by a distant external source. Using the distant tide approximation, we develop a perturbation scheme for the calculation of dynamical friction…
The multiple impact hypothesis proposes that the Moon formed through a series of smaller collisions, rather than a single giant impact. This study advances our understanding of this hypothesis, as well as moon collisions in other contexts,…