Related papers: The Main Belt Comets and Ice in the Solar System
Protoplanetary disks are dust-rich structures around young stars. The crystalline and amorphous materials contained within these disks are variably thermally processed and accreted to make bodies of a wide range of sizes and compositions,…
Meteorites, and in particular primitive meteorites (chondrites), are irreplaceable probes of the solar protoplanetary disk. We review their essential properties and endeavour to place them in astrophysical context. The earliest solar system…
In its 16 years of scientific measurements, the Spitzer Space Telescope performed a number of ground breaking and key infrared measurements of Solar System objects near and far. Targets ranged from the smallest planetesimals to the giant…
Future remote sensing of exoplanets will be enhanced by a thorough investigation of our solar system Ice Giants (Neptune-size planets). What can the configuration of the magnetic field tell us (remotely) about the interior, and what…
Water ice is important for the evolution and preservation of life. Identifying the distribution of water ice in debris disks is therefore of great interest in the field of astrobiology. Furthermore, icy dust grains are expected to play…
The asteroids are primitive solar system bodies which evolve both collisionally and through disruptions due to rapid rotation [1]. These processes can lead to the formation of binary asteroids [2-4] and to the release of dust [5], both…
As part of the national scientific network 'Pathways to Habitable Worlds' the delivery of water onto terrestrial planets is a key question since water is essential for the development of life as we know it. After summarizing the state of…
The last three decades the asteroid (1) Ceres is an object of the intensive ground-and space-based observations. A new unusual contributing to these studies represents the recent detection of localized sources of water vapour releasing from…
'Debris disks' are collections of small bodies around stars, such as the Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt in our Solar System. These disks are composed of objects smaller than planets, including asteroids, comets, dust, and dwarf planets. We…
The small bodies in the Kuiper Belt region of the distant Solar System are leftovers from planet formation. Their orbital distribution today tells us about how giant planets migrated, while their surface properties, shapes, and sizes tell…
Using a fully autonomous spacecraft - Bering - we propose to detect and study sub-km asteroids from an orbit within the asteroid Main Belt. The main purpose of the proposed Bering mission is to detect a statistically significant sample of…
The discovery of binaries in each of the major populations of minor bodies in the solar system is propelling a rapid growth of heretofore unattainable physical information. The availability of mass and density constraints for minor bodies…
The proposed CUBES spectrograph for ESO's Very Large Telescope will be an exceptionally powerful instrument for the study of comets. The gas coma of a comet contains a large number of emission features in the near-UV range covered by CUBES…
The origin of complex organic molecules such as amino acids and their precursors found in meteorites and comets is unknown. Previous studies have accounted for the complex organic inventory of the Solar System by aqueous chemistry on warm…
We employ an efficient numerical approach to simulate a stationary distribution of test objects, which results from their gravitational scattering on the four giant planets, with accounting for effects of mean motion resonances. Using the…
Ice in main belt asteroids and Near Earth Objects (NEOs) is of scientific and resource exploration interest, but small airless bodies gradually lose their ice to space by outward diffusion. Here, we quantitatively estimate the time it takes…
Active small bodies in extrasolar systems, the extrasolar analogues of Solar System comets, provide insights into the orbital evolution and physical processes shaping planetary systems. Since the discovery of exocomets around $\beta$…
We argue that the presence of water vapor in the circumstellar outflow of a carbon-rich AGB star is potentially a distinctive signature of extra-solar cometary systems. Detailed models show that at suitable distances from the star, water…
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…
Understanding the phases of water ice that were present in the solar nebula has implications for understanding cometary and planetary compositions as well as internal evolution of these bodies. Here we show that amorphous ice formed more…