Related papers: The Future of Stardust Science
Supernova blasts envelop many surrounding stellar systems, transferring kinetic energy to small bodies in the systems. Geologic evidence from $^{60}\rm Fe$ points to recent nearby supernova activity within the past several Myr. Here, we…
The Oort Cloud remains one of the most poorly explored regions of the Solar System. We propose that its properties can be constrained by studying a population of dust grains produced in collisions of comets in the outer Solar System. We…
Kuiper belt objects, such as Arrokoth, the probable progenitors of short-period comets, formed and evolved at large heliocentric distances, where the ambient temperatures appear to be sufficiently low for preserving volatile ices. By…
In addition to planets and other small bodies, stellar systems will likely also host exozodiacal dust, or exozodi. This warm dust primarily resides in or near the habitable zone of a star, and scatters stellar light in visible to NIR…
Understanding the origin and long-term evolution of the Solar System is a fundamental goal of planetary science and astrophysics. This chapter describes our current understanding of the key processes that shaped our planetary system,…
The Solar System hosts the most studied and best understood major and minor planetary bodies - and the only extraterrestrial bodies to have been visited by spacecraft. The Solar System therefore provides important constraints on both the…
Around 2% of all A stars have photospheres depleted in refractory elements. This is hypothesized to arise from a preferential accretion of gas rather than dust, but the specific processes and the origin of the material -- circum- or…
In January 2006, the Stardust mission will return the first samples from a solid solar-system body since Apollo, and the first samples of contemporary interstellar dust ever collected. Although sophisticated laboratory instruments exist for…
With a Jupiter-like exoplanet and a debris disk with both asteroid and Kuiper belt analogs, $\epsilon$ Eridani has a fascinating resemblance to our expectations for a young Solar System. We present a deep HST/STIS coronographic dataset…
The triple asteroids and triple Kuiper belt objects (collectively called the triple minor planets) in the Solar system are of particular interest to the scientific community since the discovery of the first triple asteroid system in 2004.…
Nearly one-third of objects occupying the most circular, coplanar Kuiper belt orbits (the cold classical belt) are binary, and several percent of them are "ultra-wide" binaries (UWBs): 100-km-sized companions spaced by tens of thousands of…
One of the most fundamental problems in the study of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) is to know their true physical size. Without knowledge of their albedos we are not able to distinguish large and dark from small and bright KBOs. Spitzer…
We used N-body simulations to model the 4.5 Gyr orbital evolution of the early Kuiper Belt, incorporating a massive protoplanetary disk, the four giant planets, and 1500 primordial Pluto-class bodies ("Plutos") that drove Neptune's grainy…
Excess emission, associated with warm, dust belts, commonly known as exozodis, has been observed around a third of nearby stars. The high levels of dust required to explain the observations are not generally consistent with steady-state…
The cold main classical Kuiper Belt consists of those non-resonant small solar system bodies with low orbital inclinations and orbital semi-major axes between 42.4 and 47.7 au. These objects likely formed \textit{in situ} and the population…
The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies. Current observational results in our galaxy provide a complex physical and chemical…
Comets likely formed in the outer regions of the protosolar nebula where they incorporated and preserved primitive presolar materials, volatiles resident in the outer disk, and more refractory materials from throughout the disk. The return…
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…
Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) represent some of the most ancient remnants of our solar system, having evaded significant thermal or evolutionary processing. This makes them important targets for exploration as they offer a unique opportunity…
The overarching goal of planetary astronomy is to deduce how the present collection of objects found in our Solar System were formed from the original material present in the proto-solar nebula. As over two hundred exo-planetary systems are…