Related papers: Structural analysis of rubble-pile asteroids appli…
An asteroid spun up to its critical limit has unique surface mechanical properties that its gravity and the centrifugal force largely balance, creating a relaxation environment where low-energy events such as mass shedding may trigger…
Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their…
The rotational distribution of asteroids as a function of their size is used {as a diagnostic of} their physical properties and evolution. Recent photometric surveys from the Gaia mission, allowing observation of asteroids with long spin…
Surface shedding of an asteroid is a failure mode where surface materials fly off due to strong centrifugal forces beyond the critical spin period, while the internal structure does not deform significantly. This paper proposes a possible…
Asteroids and meteorites provide key evidence on the formation of planetesimals in the Solar System. Asteroids are traditionally thought to form in a bottom-up process by coagulation within a population of initially km-scale planetesimals.…
In the last decade, thanks to the development of sophisticated numerical codes, major breakthroughs have been achieved in our understanding of the formation of asteroid families by catastrophic disruption of large parent bodies. In this…
A statistical analysis of brightness variability of asteroids reveals how their shapes evolve from elongated to rough spheroidal forms, presumably driven by impact-related phenomena. Based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object…
This paper presents a brief review and latest results of the work that has been carried out by the Planetary Science community in order to understand that role of the geotechnical properties of granular asteroids (commonly known as…
Many asteroids are rubble piles with irregular shapes. While the irregular shapes of large asteroids may be attributed to collisional events, those of small asteroids may result from not only impact events but also rotationally induced…
Most major planetary bodies in the solar system rotate in the same direction as their orbital motion: their spin is prograde. Theoretical studies to explain the direction as well as the magnitude of the spin vector have had mixed success.…
Surfaces of planets and small bodies of our Solar System are often covered by a layer of granular material that can range from a fine regolith to a gravel-like structure of varying depths. Therefore, the dynamics of granular materials are…
Conditions for regolith landslides to occur on spinning, gravitating spheroidal asteroids and their aftermath are studied. These conditions are developed by application of classical granular mechanics stability analysis to the asteroid…
We aim to understand how landslides affect the shape and rotational motion of small rubble planetary bodies. We limit ourselves to axisymmetric global landslides, and take the primordial shape of the body to also be axisymmetric. The…
Rotational dynamics of asteroids carry important information about their internal structure, collisional history and material composition. This work investigates whether M-type asteroids exhibit systematically higher rotation rates than the…
Most meteorites are fragments from recent collisions experienced in the asteroid belt. In such a hyper-velocity collision, the smaller collision partner is destroyed, whereas a crater on the asteroid is formed or it is entirely disrupted,…
We present the first self-consistent simulations of the coupled spin-shape evolution of small gravitational aggregates under the influence of the YORP effect. Because of YORP's sensitivity to surface topography, even small centrifugally…
Debris discs are traditionally studied using two distinct types of numerical models: statistical particle-in-a-box codes to study their collisional and size distribution evolution, and dynamical N-body models to study their spatial…
More than a half of asteroids in the main belt have irregular shapes with the ratios of the minor to major axis lengths less than 0.6. One of the mechanisms to create such shapes is collisions between asteroids. The relationship between…
We present an approach for the inclusion of non-spherical constituents in high-resolution N-body discrete element method (DEM) simulations. We use aggregates composed of bonded spheres to model non-spherical components. Though the method…
Over the course of the recent decades, $N$-body simulations have become a standard tool for quantifying the gravitational perturbations that ensue in planet-forming disks. Within the context of such simulations, massive non-central bodies…