Related papers: Orbital Alignment of Main-Belt Comets
Outer satellites of the planets have distant, eccentric orbits that can be highly inclined or even retrograde relative to the equatorial planes of their planets. These irregular orbits cannot have formed by circumplanetary accretion and are…
Many stars are surrounded by disks of dusty debris formed in the collisions of asteroids, comets and dwarf planets. But is gas also released in such events? Observations at submm wavelengths of the archetypal debris disk around $\beta$…
The eccentricity evolution of multiple planet systems can provide valuable constraints on planet formation models. Unfortunately, the inevitable uncertainties in the current orbital elements can lead to significant ambiguities in the nature…
We have numerically investigated the long term dynamical behavior of known Centaurs. This class of objects is thought to constitute the transitional population between the Kuiper Belt and the Jupiter-family comets (JFCs). In our study, we…
Many exoplanets in close-in orbits are observed to have relatively high eccentricities and large stellar obliquities. We explore the possibility that these result from planet-planet scattering by studying the dynamical outcomes from a large…
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,…
The size distribution and total mass of objects in the Oort Cloud have important implications to the theory of planets formation, including the properties of, and the processes taking place in the early solar system. We discuss the…
Dawson and Murray-Clay (2012) pointed out that the inner part of the cold population in the Kuiper belt (that with semi major axis a<43.5 AU) has orbital eccentricities significantly smaller than the limit imposed by stability constraints.…
The zodiacal cloud is a thick circumsolar disk of small debris particles produced by asteroid collisions and comets. Here, we present a zodiacal cloud model based on the orbital properties and lifetimes of comets and asteroids, and on the…
Mapping exoplanets across phases and during secondary eclipse is a powerful technique for characterizing Hot Jupiters in emission. Since these planets are expected to rotate about axes normal to their orbital planes, with rotation periods…
Since exoplanets were detected using the radial velocity method, they have revealed a diverse distribution of orbital configurations. Amongst these are planets in highly eccentric orbits (e > 0.5). Most of these systems consist of a single…
We run simulations to determine the expected distribution of orbital elements of nearly isotropic comets (NICs) in the outer solar system, assuming that these comets originate in the Oort Cloud at thousands of AU and are perturbed into the…
For a hypothetical planet on a highly eccentric orbit, we have calculated the osculating orbital parameters and its closest approaches to Earth and Moon over a period of 750 kyr. The approaches which are close enough to influence the…
We present a scenario for the production of dynamically cold rings around the Milky Way via a high-eccentricity, flyby encounter. These initial conditions are more cosmologically motivated than those considered in previous works. We find…
Impact basins identified by Mariner 10 and Messenger flyby images provide us a fossilized record of the impactor flux of asteroids on Mercury during the last stages of the early Solar System. The distribution of these basins is not uniform…
Inspirals of an Intermediate Mass Black Hole (IMBH) and a solar mass type object will be observable by space based gravitational wave detectors such as The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). A dark matter overdensity around an IMBH…
A significant fraction of hot Jupiters have orbital axes misaligned with their host stars' spin axes. The large stellar obliquities of these giants have long been considered potential signatures of high-eccentricity migration, which is…
Over the course of the past two decades, observational surveys have unveiled the intricate orbital structure of the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy bodies orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. In addition to a host of readily-predictable orbital…
<<>> Among the components of the infrared and submillimetre sky background, the closest layer is the thermal emission of dust particles and minor bodies in the Solar System. This contribution is especially important for current and future…
Understanding the provenance of CI and CM chondrites, the most primitive materials in our meteorite collections, is critical for shedding light on the Solar System's early evolution and contextualizing findings from recent sample return…