Related papers: "Isocrater" impacts: Conditions and mantle dynamic…
Impacts by rocky and icy bodies are thought to have played a key role in shaping the composition of solar system objects, including the Earth's habitability. Hence, it is likely that they play a similar role in exoplanetary systems. We…
We investigate the patterns observed in ejecta curtain induced by hypervelocity impact (2-6 km/s) with a variety of the size and shape of target particles. We characterize the patterns by an angle, defined as the ratio of the characteristic…
The scattering of small bodies by planets is an important dynamical process in planetary systems. We present an analytical model to describe this process using the simplifying assumption that each particle's dynamics is dominated by a…
Simulations of the moon-forming impact suggest that most of the lunar material derives from the impactor rather than the Earth. Measurements of lunar samples, however, reveal an oxygen isotope composition that is indistinguishable from…
A large sample of planet-planet scattering events for three planet systems with different orbital separations and masses is analyzed with a multiple regression model. The dependence of the time for the onset of instability on the masses of…
The lunar crater record features $\sim 50$ basins. The radiometric dating of Apollo samples indicates that the Imbrium basin formed relatively late -- from the planet formation perspective -- some $\simeq 3.9$ Ga. Here we develop a…
Stochastic impacts by large bodies are, at present, the usually accepted mechanisms able to account for the obliquity of the ice giants. We attempt to set constraints on giant impacts as the cause of Neptune's current obliquity in the…
Multiple impact basins formed on the Moon about 3.8 Gyr ago in what is known as the lunar cataclysm or late heavy bombardment. Many workers currently interpret the lunar cataclysm as an impact spike primarily caused by main-belt asteroids…
The late stages of terrestrial planet formation are dominated by giant impacts that collectively influence the growth, composition and habitability of any planets that form. Hitherto, numerical models designed to explore these late stage…
Observations and meteorites indicate that the Martian materials are enigmatically distributed within the inner solar system. A mega impact on Mars creating a Martian hemispheric dichotomy and the Martian moons can potentially eject Martian…
Giant impacts dominate the late stages of accretion of rocky planets. They contribute to the heating, melting, and sometimes vaporizing of the bodies involved in the impacts. Due to fractionation during melting and vaporization,…
Planetary impact events eject large volumes of surface material. Crater excavation processes are difficult to study, and in particular the details of individual ejecta fragments are not well understood. A related, enduring issue in…
One of the unique aspects of Earth is that it has a fractionally large Moon, which is thought to have formed from a Moon-forming disk generated by a giant impact. The Moon stabilizes the Earth's spin axis at least by several degrees and…
The asteroids are the major source of potential impactors on the Earth today. It has long been assumed that the giant planet Jupiter acts as a shield, significantly lowering the impact rate on the Earth from both cometary and asteroidal…
When a jet of gas impinges vertically on a granular bed and forms a crater, the grains may be moved by several different mechanisms: viscous erosion, diffused gas eruption, bearing capacity failure, and/or diffusion-driven shearing. The…
We model the evolution of planets with various masses and compositions. We investigate the effects of the composition and its depth dependence on the long-term evolution of the planets. The effects of opacity and stellar irradiation are…
We review previously published and newly obtained crater size-frequency distributions in the inner solar system. These data indicate that the Moon and the terrestrial planets have been bombarded by two populations of objects. Population 1,…
Asteroids colliding with planets vary in composition and taxonomical type. Among Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are the V-types, basaltic asteroids that are classified via spectroscopic observations. In this work, we study the probability of…
This paper considers the dynamics of scattering of planetesimals or planetary embryos by a planet on a circumstellar orbit. We classify six regions in the planet's mass versus semimajor axis parameter space according to the dominant outcome…
As a droplet impacts on a granular substrate, both the intruder and the target deform, during which the liquid may penetrate into the substrate. {These three aspects together distinguish} it from other impact phenomena in the literature. We…