Related papers: The Future of Stardust Science
Debris disks around main-sequence stars are believed to derive from planetesimal populations that have accreted at early epochs and survived possible planet formation processes. While debris disks must contain solids in a broad range of…
Context. The Stardust flyby mission to Jupiter-family comet (JFC) 81P/Wild 2 (hereafter, 81P) captured its dense quasicircular depressions. Nevertheless, the formation mechanism remains a subject of ongoing debate. Aims. We aimed to study…
Observations of the Kuiper Belt indicate that a larger than expected percentage of KBO's (approximately 8 out of 500) are in binary pairs. The formation and survival of such objects presents a conundrum [1]. Two competing theories have been…
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…
Context. The populations of small bodies of the Solar System (asteroids, comets, Kuiper-Belt objects) are used to constrain the origin and evolution of the Solar System. Both their orbital distribution and composition distribution are…
This review describes our current understanding of interstellar extinction. This differ substantially from the ideas of the 20th century. With infrared surveys of hundreds of millions of stars over the entire sky, such as 2MASS,…
Dynamical mass estimates for the main asteroid belt and the trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt have been found from their gravitational influence on the motion of planets. Discrete rotating models consisting of moving material points have been…
Rocky asteroids and planets display nucleosynthetic isotope variations that are attributed to the heterogeneous distribution of stardust from different stellar sources in the solar protoplanetary disk. Here we report new high precision…
Young stars are mostly found in dense stellar environments, and even our own Solar system may have formed in a star cluster. Here, we numerically explore the evolution of planetary systems similar to our own Solar system in star clusters.…
In the late stages of accretion leading up to the formation of planetesimals, particles grew to pebbles the size of 1-mm to tens of cm. That is the same size range that dominates the present-day comet mass loss. Meteoroids that size cause…
We perform $N$-body simulations of the early phases of open cluster evolution including a large population of planetesimals, initially arranged in Kuiper-belt like discs around each star. Using a new, 4th-order and time-reversible $N$-body…
Observations of dusty debris disks can be used to test theories of planetesimal coagulation. Planetesimals of sizes up to a couple thousand kms are embedded in these disks and their mutual collisions generate the small dust grains that are…
As a recently recognized class of objects exhibiting apparently cometary (sublimation-driven) activity yet orbiting completely within the main asteroid belt, main-belt comets (MBCs) have revealed the existence of present-day ice in small…
A considerable amount of information regarding the processes that occurred during the accretion of the early planetesimals is still present among the small bodies of our solar system. A review of our current knowledge of the density of…
Understanding the origin of comets requires knowledge of how the Solar System formed from a cloud of dust and gas 4.567 Gyr ago. Here, a review is presented of how the remnants of this formation process, meteorites and to a lesser extent…
Recent analyses have shown that distant orbits within the scattered disk population of the Kuiper belt exhibit an unexpected clustering in their respective arguments of perihelion. While several hypotheses have been put forward to explain…
Infrared studies have revealed debris likely related to planet formation in orbit around ~30% of youthful, intermediate mass, main sequence stars. We present evidence, based on atmospheric pollution by various elements heavier than helium,…
A distant, massive planet in the outer solar system has recently been proposed to explain some observed features of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Here we use N-body simulations of the formation of the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud as…
Debris discs are dusty belts of planetesimals around main-sequence stars, similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our solar system. The planetesimals cannot be observed directly, yet they produce detectable dust in mutual collisions.…
The presence of an unseen `Planet 9' on the outskirts of the Solar system has been invoked to explain the unexpected clustering of the orbits of several Edgeworth--Kuiper Belt Objects. We use $N$-body simulations to investigate the…