Related papers: The Future of Stardust Science
Advances in the discovery and characterization of asteroids over the past decade have revealed an unanticipated underlying structure that points to a dramatic early history of the inner Solar System. The asteroids in the main asteroid belt…
We present the first results of the Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 Test of Surfaces in the Outer Solar System (H/WTSOSS). The purpose of this survey was to measure the surface properties of a large number of Kuiper belt objects and attempt to…
We conducted a search for occultations of bright stars by Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) to estimate the density of sub-km KBOs in the sky. We report here the first results of this occultation survey of the outer solar system conducted in June…
Planetary systems that orbit white dwarf stars can be studied via spectroscopic observations of the stars themselves. Numerous white dwarfs are seen to have accreted mostly rocky minor planets, the remnants of which are present in the…
We have used recent surveys of the composition of exoplanet host stars to investigate the expected composition of condensed material in planetesimals formed beyond the snow line in the circumstellar nebulae of these systems. Of the major…
The anomalous chemical abundances and the structure of the Edgewood-Kuiper belt observed in the solar system constrain the initial mass and radius of the star cluster in which the sun was born to $M\simeq500$ to 3000 \msun and $R\simeq 1$…
Chondritic meteorites constitute the most ancient rock record available in the laboratory to study the formation of the solar system and its planets. Detailed investigations of their mineralogy, petrography, chemistry and isotopic…
Samples returned from comet 81P/Wild 2 by Stardust confirm that substantial quantities of crystalline silicates were incorporated into the comet at formation. We investigate the constraints that this observation places upon protoplanetary…
The census of heavy elements (metals) produced by all stars through cosmic times up to present-day is limited to ~50%; of these only half are still found within their parent galaxy. The majority of metals is expelled from galaxies into the…
Questions regarding how primordial or pristine the comets of the solar system are have been an ongoing controversy. In this review, we describe comets' physical evolution from dust and ice grains in the solar nebula to the contemporary…
We describe analytical and numerical collisional evolution calculations for the size distribution of icy bodies in the Kuiper Belt. For a wide range of bulk properties, initial masses, and orbital parameters, our results yield power-law…
We report the statistical detection (at the >99% confidence level) of a population of 28th magnitude objects exhibiting proper motions of ~1 arcsecond per hour at quadrature in deep HST/WFPC2 images. The drift directions imply a…
(abridged) Infrared excesses associated with debris disk host stars detected so far peak at wavelengths around ~100{\mu}m or shorter. However, six out of 31 excess sources in the Herschel OTKP DUNES have been seen to show significant - and…
Over the past three decades, we have witnessed one of the great revolutions in our understanding of the cosmos - the dawn of the Exoplanet Era. Where once we knew of just one planetary system (the Solar system), we now know of thousands,…
The discovery of Sedna places new constraints on the origin and evolution of our solar system. Here we investigate the possibility that a close encounter with another star produced the observed edge of the Kuiper belt, at roughly 50 AU, and…
We present a chronology of the formation and early evolution of the Oort cloud by simulations. These simulations start with the Solar System being born with planets and asteroids in a stellar cluster orbiting the Galactic center. Upon…
The Edgeworth-Kuiper belt encodes the dynamical history of the outer solar system. Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) bear witness to coagulation physics, the evolution of planetary orbits, and external perturbations from the solar neighborhood. We…
The interest in the structure of ice-rich planetary bodies, in particular the differentiation between ice and rock, has grown due to the discovery of Kuiper belt objects and exoplanets. We thus carry out a parameter study for a range of…
Our goal is to understand primary accretion of the first planetesimals. The primitive meteorite record suggests that sizeable planetesimals formed in the asteroid belt over a period longer than a million years, each composed entirely of an…
Debris discs are a consequence of the planet formation process and constitute the fingerprints of planetesimal systems. Their solar system's counterparts are the asteroid and Edgeworth-Kuiper belts. The DUNES survey aims at detecting…