Related papers: Using impact exsolution to link the Chicxulub coll…
Globally disruptive events include asteroid/comet impacts, large igneous provinces and glaciations, all of which have been considered as contributors to mass extinctions. Understanding the overall relationship between the timings of the…
Despite tremendous interest in the topic and decades of research, the origins of the major losses of biodiversity in the history of life on Earth remain elusive. A variety of possible causes for these mass-extinction events have been…
A new theoretical hypothesis on the origin and formation of the solar and extrasolar planetary systems is summarized and briefly discussed in the light of recent detections of extrasolar planets, and studies of shock wave interaction with…
The probability is investigated that the meteorites originating on Earth are transferred to other planets in our Solar System and to extra solar planets. We take the collisional Chicxulub crater event, and material that was ejected as an…
After reviewing the difficulties faced by the conventional theory of planet formation (based upon the aggregation of microscopic dust particles), we describe an alternative hypothesis. We propose that planets form by gravitational collapse…
A giant impact is commonly thought to explain the dramatic contrast in elevation and crustal thickness between the two hemispheres of Mars known as the "Martian Dichotomy". Initially, this scenario referred to an impact in the northern…
The migration of the giant planets due to the scattering of planetesimals causes powerful resonances to move through the asteroid belt and the terrestrial planet region. Exactly when and how the giant planets migrated is not well known. In…
Collisions are the core agent of planet formation. In this work, we derive an analytic description of the dynamical outcome for any collision between gravity-dominated bodies. We conduct high-resolution simulations of collisions between…
Sunquakes are one of the more distinct secondary phenomena related to solar flares, where energy deposition in the lower layers of the Sun's atmosphere excites acoustic waves easily visible in Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI)…
Accretion of debris seems to be the natural mechanism to power the radiation emitted during a tidal disruption event (TDE), in which a supermassive black hole tears apart a star. However, this requires the prompt formation of a compact…
Giant impacts, the collisions between planetary embryos, play a crucial role in sculpting the planets and their orbital architectures. Numerical simulations have advanced our understanding of these events, enabling estimations of mass and…
Theories of how galaxies, the fundamental constituents of large-scale structure, form and evolve have undergone a dramatic paradigm shift in the last few decades. Earlier views were of rapid, early collapse and formation of basic…
The formation of satellites is thought to be a natural by-product of planet formation in our Solar System, and thus, moons of extrasolar planets (exomoons) may be abundant in extrasolar planetary systems, as well. Exomoons have yet to be…
The search for extrasolar rocky planets has already found the first transiting rocky super-Earth, Corot 7b, with a surface temperature that allows for magma oceans. Here we ask if we could distinguish rocky planets with recent major…
In the leading theory of lunar formation, known as the giant impact hypothesis, a collision between two planet-size objects resulted in a young Earth surrounded by a circumplanetary debris disk from which the Moon later accreted. The range…
Circumstellar debris disks are the extrasolar analogues of the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. They consist of comets and leftover planetesimals that continuously collide and produce circumstellar dust that can be observed as infrared…
Recent works have shown that Martian moons Phobos and Deimos may have accreted within a giant impact-generated disk whose composition is about an equal mixture of Martian material and impactor material. Just after the giant impact, the…
This monograph presents a study of the nature and origin of meteorites, asteroids and comets; and of the consequences of encounters of these cosmic objects with the Earth. The purpose of this monograph is mainly of divulgation for…
Gravitational scattering between massive planets has been invoked to explain the eccentricity distribution of extrasolar planets. For scattering to occur, the planets must either form in -- or migrate into -- an unstable configuration. In…
Astrophysical fluid bodies that orbit close to one another induce tidal distortions and flows that are subject to dissipative processes. The spin and orbital motions undergo a coupled evolution over astronomical timescales, which is…