Related papers: The Empty Primordial Asteroid Belt
Asteroid pairs sharing similar heliocentric orbits were found recently. Backward integrations of their orbits indicated that they separated gently with low relative velocities, but did not provide additional insight into their formation…
The solar system planetary architecture has been proposed to be consistent with the terrestrial and giant planets forming from material rings at ~1 au and ~5 au, respectively. Here, we show that super-Earths and mini-Neptunes may share a…
We argue that all transient searches for planets in globular clusters have a very low detection probability. Planets of low metallicity stars typically do not reside at small orbital separations. The dependance of planetary system…
The basic structure of the solar system is set by the presence of low-mass terrestrial planets in its inner part and giant planets in its outer part. This is the result of the formation of a system of multiple embryos with approximately the…
During the late stage of planet formation when Mars-size cores appear, interactions among planetary cores can excite their orbital eccentricities, speed their merges and thus sculpture the final architecture of planet systems. This series…
Several stars show deep transits consistent with discs of roughly 1 Solar radius seen at moderate inclinations, likely surrounding planets on eccentric orbits. We show that this configuration arises naturally as a result of planet-planet…
Regular satellites of giant planets are formed by accretion of solid bodies in circumplanetary disks. Planetesimals that are moving on heliocentric orbits and are sufficiently large to be decoupled from the flow of the protoplanetary gas…
Super-Earths are found in tighter orbits than the Earth's around more than one third of main sequence stars. It has been proposed that super-Earths are scaled-up terrestrial planets that formed similarly, through mutual accretion of…
An unsolved issue in the standard core accretion model for gaseous planet formation is how kilometre-sized planetesimals form from, initially, micron-sized dust grains. Solid growth beyond metre sizes can be difficult both because the…
Estimates of the frequency of planetary systems in the Milky Way are observationally limited by the low-mass planet regime. Nevertheless, substantial evidence for systems with undetectably low planetary masses now exist in the form of…
The formation of a cold Jupiter (CJ) is expected to quench the influx of pebbles and the migration of cores interior to its orbit, thus limiting the efficiency of rocky planet formation either by pebble accretion and/or orbital migration.…
Building the terrestrial planets has been a challenge for planet formation models. In particular, classical theories have been unable to reproduce the small mass of Mars and instead predict that a planet near 1.5 AU should roughly be the…
A quarter of DA white dwarfs are metal polluted, yet elements heavier than helium sink down through the stellar atmosphere on timescales of days. Hence, these white dwarfs must be currently accreting material containing heavy elements.…
A planet orbiting in a disk of planetesimals can experience an instability in which it migrates to smaller orbital radii. Resonant interactions between the planet and planetesimals remove angular momentum from the planetesimals, increasing…
Erosive collisions among planetary embryos in the inner solar system can lead to multiple remnant bodies, varied in mass, composition and residual velocity. Some of the smaller, unbound debris may become available to seed the main asteroid…
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…
It has long been known that stars with high metallicity are more likely to host giant planets than stars with low metallicity. Yet the connection between host star metallicity and the properties of small planets is only just beginning to be…
The consistency of planet formation models suffers from the disconnection between the regime of small and large bodies. This is primarily caused by so-called growth barriers: the direct growth of larger bodies is halted at centimetre-sized…
The process leading to the formation of the terrestrial planet remains elusive. In a previous publication, we have shown that, if the first generation of planetesimals forms in a ring at about 1 AU and the gas disk's density peaks at the…
Asteroids are classified as tiny and light objects in the solar system, however some of them possess orbiting moons. According to surveys, 15% of near-earth asteroids have moons. The Electrical Discharge effect provides a new model that…