Related papers: Ceres and the Terrestrial Planets Impact Cratering…
The origin of fast radio bursts (FRBs) is still a mystery. One model proposed to interpret the only known repeating object, FRB 121102, is that the radio emission is generated from asteroids colliding with a highly magnetized neutron star…
We report a comprehensive analysis of the global spectrophotometric properties of Ceres using Dawn Framing Camera images collected from April to June 2015 during the RC3 and Survey mission phases. The single-scattering albedo of Ceres at…
The goal of Project GAUSS is to return samples from the dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres is the most accessible ocean world candidate and the largest reservoir of water in the inner solar system. It shows active cryovolcanism and hydrothermal…
The main belt, the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is home to more than 1 million asteroids. These asteroids form orbital groups, (i.e., asteroid families formed by collisions) and also spectral groups (taxonomies) with…
V-type asteroids are a taxonomic class whose surface is associated to a basaltic composition. The only known source of V-type asteroids in the Main Asteroid Belt is (4) Vesta, that is located in the inner part of the belt. However, many…
The asteroid belt is characterized by an extreme low total mass of material on dynamically excited orbits. The Nice Model explains many peculiar qualities of the solar system, including the belt's excited state, by invoking an orbital…
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…
Debris discs consist of belts of bodies ranging in size from dust grains to planetesimals; these belts are visible markers of planetary systems around other stars that can reveal the influence of extrasolar planets through their shape and…
In many ways, the HR 8799 planetary system strongly resembles our own. It features four giant planets and two debris belts, analogues to the Asteroid and Edgeworth-Kuiper belts. Here, we present the results of dynamical simulations of HR…
Containing only a few percent the mass of the moon, the current asteroid belt is around three to four orders of magnitude smaller that its primordial mass inferred from disk models. Yet dynamical studies have shown that the asteroid belt…
Polluted white dwarfs are generally accreting terrestrial-like material that may originate from a debris belt like the asteroid belt in the solar system. The fraction of white dwarfs that are polluted drops off significantly for white…
The small ($\le$ 135 km mean radius) saturnian satellites are closely related to the rings and together they constitute a complex dynamical system where formation and destruction mechanisms compete against each other. We model the cratering…
Giant, wide-separation planets often lie in the gap between multiple, distinct rings of circumstellar debris: this is the case for the HR\,8799 and HD\,95086 systems, and even the solar system where the Asteroid and Kuiper belts enclose the…
We consider the role of the dwarf planet Ceres on the secular dynamics of the asteroid main belt. Specifically, we examine the post impact evolution of asteroid families due to the interaction of their members with the linear nodal secular…
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 distribution of asteroids across the Main Belt has been studied for decades to understand the compositional distribution and what that tells us about the formation and evolution of our solar system. All-sky surveys now provide orders of…
We assess the ability of a solid ring to model a global perturbation induced by several thousands of main-belt asteroids. The ring is first studied in an analytical framework that provides an estimate of all the ring's parameters excepting…
Context. The dwarf planet Ceres and the asteroid Vesta have been studied by the Dawn space mission. They are the two heaviest bodies of the main asteroid belt and have different characteristics. Notably, Vesta appears to be dry and inactive…
Asteroid (7) Iris is an ideal target for disk-resolved imaging owing to its brightness (V$\sim$7-8) and large angular size of 0.33 arcsec during its apparitions. Iris is believed to belong to the category of large unfragmented asteroids…
Debris disks are the dust disks found around ~20% of nearby main sequence stars in far-IR surveys. They can be considered as descendants of protoplanetary disks or components of planetary systems, providing valuable information on…