Related papers: The Future of Stardust Science
Exocomets are small bodies releasing gas and dust which orbit stars other than the Sun. Their existence was first inferred from the detection of variable absorption features in stellar spectra in the late 1980s using spectroscopy. More…
The discovery of binaries in each of the major populations of minor bodies in the solar system is propelling a rapid growth of heretofore unattainable physical information. The availability of mass and density constraints for minor bodies…
In studies of the oldest solar system bodies - comets and asteroids - it is their fragments - meteoroids - that provide the most accessible planetary material for detailed laboratory analysis in the form of dust particles or meteorites.…
Debris disks are the dust disks found around ~20% of nearby main sequence stars in far-IR surveys. They can be considered as descendants of protoplanetary disks or components of planetary systems, providing valuable information on…
In its 16 years of scientific measurements, the Spitzer Space Telescope performed a number of ground-breaking infrared measurements of Solar System objects. In this second of two papers, we describe results from Spitzer observations of…
The longitudes of perihelia and orbital poles of the solar system's dozen or so most remote detected objects are clustered in a manner inconsistent with that of a random sample of uniformly distributed orbits. While small number statistics…
Some planetary systems harbour debris disks containing planetesimals such as asteroids and comets. Collisions between such bodies produce small dust particles, the spectral features of which reveal their composition and, hence, that of…
The Kuiper Belt of our solar system is a source of short-period comets that may have delivered water and other volatiles to Earth and the other terrestrial planets. However, the distribution of water and other volatiles in extrasolar…
Debris disks are dusty, gas-poor disks around main sequence stars (Backman & Paresce 1993; Lagrange, Backman & Artymowicz 2000; Zuckerman 2001). Micron-sized dust grains are inferred to exist in these systems from measurements of their…
Modern studies of the early solar system routinely invoke the possibility of an orbital instability among the giant planets triggered by gravitational interactions between the planets and a massive exterior disk of planetesimals. Previous…
Cold Classical Kuiper belt objects (CCKBOs) are considered first-generation planetesimals that formed 42-47 au from the Sun and remained untouched since. Formation is thought to proceed by clumping of dust particles in protoplanetary disk…
The study of comets affords a unique window into the birth, infancy, and subsequent history of the solar system. There is strong evidence that comets incorporated pristine interstellar material as well as processed nebular matter, providing…
We have proposed an alternative model for the formation of our solar system that does not predict any mean-motion resonant interactions, planetary migrations, or self-gravitating instabilities in the very early isothermal solar nebula and…
Born as ice-rich planetesimals, cometary nuclei were gravitationally scattered onto their current orbits in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud during the giant planets' dynamical instability in the early stages of our Solar System's…
We show the effects of the perturbation caused by a passing by star on the Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) of our Solar System. The dynamics of the Kuiper belt (KB) is followed by direct $N$-body simulations. The sampling of the KB has been done…
We propose a scenario for the formation of the Main Belt in which asteroids incorporated icy particles formed in the outer Solar Nebula. We calculate the composition of icy planetesimals formed beyond a heliocentric distance of 5 AU in the…
Using the absolute detection calibration and abundant detections of the OSSOS (Outer Solar System Origin Survey) project, we provide population measurements for the main Kuiper Belt. For absolute magnitude $H_r<8.3$, there are 30,000…
The dust produced in the Kuiper Belt (KB) spreads throughout the Solar System forming a dust disk. We numerically model the orbital evolution of KB dust and estimate its equilibrium spatial distribution and its brightness and spectral…
We present deep 1.2 millimeter photometry of 37 stars in the young (5 Myr) Upper Scorpius OB association, sensitive to ~4 x 10^-3 Mjup of cool millimeter dust. Disks around four low- and solar-mass stars are detected, as well as one debris…
Planetary science beyond the boundaries of our Solar System is today in its infancy. Until a couple of decades ago, the detailed investigation of the planetary properties was restricted to objects orbiting inside the Kuiper Belt. Today, we…