Related papers: Trojan capture by terrestrial planets
The characteristics of the resonant disturbing function for an asteroid perturbed by a planet in circular orbit are discussed. The location of the libration centers and their dependence with the orbital elements of the resonant orbit are…
We have observed well-sampled phase curves for nine Trojan asteroids in B-, V-, and I-bands. These were constructed from 778 magnitudes taken with the 1.3-m telescope on Cerro Tololo as operated by a service observer for the SMARTS…
The origin of the Martian moons Deimos and Phobos is controversial. One hypothesis for their origin is that they are captured asteroids, but the mechanism requires an extremely dense martian atmosphere, and the mechanism by which an…
Circumbinary planets whose orbits become unstable may be ejected, accreted, or even captured by one of the stars. We quantify the relative rates of these channels, for a binary of secondary star's mass fraction 0.1 with an orbit of 1AU. The…
We investigate the possibility of habitable Trojan planets in the HD 23079 star-planet system. This system consists of a solar-type star and a Jupiter-type planet, which orbits the star near the outer edge of the stellar habitable zone in…
Although current sensitivity limits are such that true Solar System analogs remain challenging to detect, numerous planetary systems have been discovered that are very different from our own Solar System. The majority of systems harbor a…
We aim to locate the stability region for Uranus Trojans (UT hereafter) and find out the dynamical mechanisms responsible for the structures in the phase space. Using the spectral number as the stability indicator, we construct the…
In co-orbital planetary systems, two or more planets share the same orbit around their star. Here we test the dynamical stability of co-orbital rings of planets perturbed by outside forces. We test two setups: i) 'stationary' rings of…
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…
Torus mapping yields constants of motion for stars trapped at a resonance. Each such constant of motion yields a system of contours in velocity space at the Sun and neighbouring points. If Jeans' theorem applied to resonantly trapped…
We consider the Roche critical density (rho_Roche), the minimum density of an orbiting object that, at a given distance from its planet, is able to hold itself together by self-gravity. It is directly related to the more familiar "Roche…
Uncovering the formation process that reproduces the distinct properties of compact super-Earth exoplanet systems is a major goal of planet formation theory. The most successful model argues that non-resonant systems begin as resonant…
The extent to which a magnetosphere protects its planetary atmosphere from stellar wind ablation depends upon how well it prevents energy and momentum exchange with the atmosphere and how well it traps otherwise escaping plasma. We focus on…
Observations and meteorites indicate that the Martian materials are enigmatically distributed within the inner solar system. A mega impact on Mars creating a Martian hemispheric dichotomy and the Martian moons can potentially eject Martian…
(abbreviated) We consider the problem of the tidal capture or circularisation from large eccentricity of a uniformly rotating object. We extend the self-adjoint formalism introduced in Papaloizou \& Ivanov 2005 (PI) to derive general…
An ever-growing observational aggregate of extrasolar planets has revealed that systems of planets that reside in or near mean-motion resonances are relatively common. While the origin of such systems is attributed to protoplanetary…
TESS and Kepler have revealed that practically all close-in sub-Neptunes form in mean-motion resonant chains, most of which unravel on timescales of 100 Myr. Using N-body integrations, we study how planetary collisions from destabilized…
Stars formed in clusters can encounter other stars at close distances. In typical open clusters in the Solar neighbourhood containing hundreds or thousands of member stars, ten to twenty per cent of Solar-mass member stars are expected to…
The increasing number of objects orbiting the Earth justifies the great attention and interest in the observation, spacecraft protection and collision avoidance. These studies involve different disturbances and resonances in the orbital…
Planet-planet scattering is the leading mechanism to explain the large eccentricities of the observed exoplanet population. However, scattering has not been considered important to the production of pairs of planets in mean motion…