Related papers: The Asteroid Belt as a Relic From a Chaotic Early …
The asteroid belt is the leftover of the original planetesimal population in the inner solar system. However, currently the asteroids have orbits with all possible values of eccentricities and inclinations compatible with long-term…
The asteroid belt was dynamically shaped during and after planet formation. Despite representing a broad ring of stable orbits, the belt contains less than one one-thousandth of an Earth mass. The asteroid orbits are dynamically excited…
It is generally accepted today that our solar system has undergone a phase during which the orbits of the giant planets became very unstable. In recent years, many studies have identified traces of this event and have provided reasonable…
The main asteroid belt lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but the region is not uniformly filled with asteroids. There are gaps, known as the Kirkwood gaps, in the asteroid distribution in distinct locations that are associated…
The asteroid belt is characterized by an extreme low total mass of material on dynamically excited orbits. The Nice Model explains many peculiar qualities of the solar system, including the belt's excited state, by invoking an orbital…
Containing only a few percent the mass of the moon, the current asteroid belt is around three to four orders of magnitude smaller that its primordial mass inferred from disk models. Yet dynamical studies have shown that the asteroid belt…
The Solar System's orbital structure is thought to have been sculpted by an episode of dynamical instability among the giant planets. However, the instability trigger and timing have not been clearly established. Hydrodynamical modeling has…
The terrestrial planets formed by accretion of asteroid-like objects within the inner solar system's protoplanetary disk. Previous works have found that forming a small-mass Mars requires the disk to contain little mass beyond ~1.5 au…
Asteroids formed in a dynamically quiescent disk but their orbits became gravitationally stirred enough by Jupiter to lead to high-speed collisions. As a result, many dozen large asteroids have been disrupted by impacts over the age of the…
The asteroid belt contains less than a thousandth of Earth's mass and is radially segregated, with S-types dominating the inner belt and C-types the outer belt. It is generally assumed that the belt formed with far more mass and was later…
Advances in the discovery and characterization of asteroids over the past decade have revealed an unanticipated underlying structure that points to a dramatic early history of the inner Solar System. The asteroids in the main asteroid belt…
The past decade has brought major improvements in large-scale asteroid discovery and characterization with over half a million known asteroids and over 100,000 with some measurement of physical characterization. This explosion of data has…
We have evaluated the rate at which the asteroid belt is losing material, and how it splits between macroscopic bodies and meteoritic dust. The mass loss process is due to the injection of asteroid fragments into unstable dynamical regions,…
We use the current orbital structure of large (>50km) asteroids in the main asteroid belt to constrain the evolution of the giant planets when they migrated from their primordial orbits to their current ones. Minton & Malhotra (2009) showed…
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…
The dynamical structure of the Solar System can be explained by a period of orbital instability experienced by the giant planets. While a late instability was originally proposed to explain the Late Heavy Bombardment, recent work favors an…
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 asteroid belt is an open window on the history of the Solar System, as it preserves records of both its formation process and its secular evolution. The progenitors of the present-day asteroids formed in the Solar Nebula almost…
Several properties of the Solar System, including the wide radial spacing of the giant planets, can be explained if planets radially migrated by exchanging orbital energy and momentum with outer disk planetesimals. Neptune's…
The formation of the solar system's giant planets predated the ultimate epoch of massive impacts that concluded the process of terrestrial planet formation. Following their formation, the giant planets' orbits evolved through an episode of…