Related papers: Small impacts on the giant planet Jupiter

We report the discovery of a long-lasting burst of disk accretion in Cha J11070768-7626326 (Cha 1107-7626), a young, isolated, 5-10 M$_{\mathrm{Jupiter}}$ object. In spectra taken with XSHOOTER at ESO's Very Large Telescope as well as…

Judging from the fact that the planet Jupiter is bigger in size than the Earth by 10^3 while is smaller than the Sun by 10^3 and that the average distance of the Jupiter from the Sun is 5.203 a.u., the solar neutrinos, when encounter the…

Asteroid (596) Scheila was the first object for which the immediate aftermath of an inter-asteroidal collision was observed. In Dec. 2010, the 113 km-sized asteroid was impacted by a smaller asteroid of less than 100 m in diameter. The…

The standard model for giant planet formation is based on the accretion of solids by a growing planetary embryo, followed by rapid gas accretion once the planet exceeds a so-called critical mass. The dominant size of the accreted solids…

In recent years, a vast increase in spectroscopic observations of transiting exoplanets has for the first time allowed us to search for broad trends in their atmospheric properties. Analysis of these observations has revealed that, even for…

The Pan-Planets survey observed an area of 42 sq deg. in the galactic disk for about 165 hours. The main scientific goal of the project is the detection of transiting planets around M dwarfs. We establish an efficient procedure for…

The Galileo spacecraft was orbiting Jupiter between Dec 1995 and Sep 2003. The Galileo dust detector monitored the jovian dust environment between about 2 and 370 R_J (jovian radius R_J = 71492 km). We present data from the Galileo dust…

Exoplanets show a pile-up of Jupiter-size planets in orbits with a 3-day period. A fraction of these hot Jupiters have retrograde orbits with respect to the parent star's rotation. To explain these observations we performed a series of…

Asteroid collisions are one of the main processes responsible for the evolution of bodies in the main belt. Using observations of the Dimorphos impact by the DART spacecraft, we estimate how asteroid collisions in the main belt may look in…

We calculate the expected flux profile of comets into the planetary system from the Oort cloud arising from Galactic tides and encounters with molecular clouds. We find that both periodic and sporadic bombardment episodes, with amplitudes…

A population of free-floating planets is known from gravitational microlensing surveys. None have a directly measured mass, owing to a degeneracy with the distance, but the population statistics indicate that many are less massive than…

We observed Jupiter at wavelengths near 2 cm with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in February 2015. These frequencies are mostly sensitive to variations in ammonia abundance and probe between ~0.5-2.0 bars of pressure in Jupiter's…

While cooler giant planets are often observed with non-zero eccentricities, the short-period circular orbits of hot Jupiters suggest that they lose orbital energy and angular momentum due to tidal interactions with their host stars.…

Jupiter-family comet 15P/Finlay has been reportedly quiet in activity for over a century but has harbored two outbursts during its 2014/2015 perihelion passage. Here we present an analysis of these two outbursts using a set of cometary…

As of today, hundreds of hot Jupiters have been found, yet the inflated radii of a large fraction of them remain unexplained. It is still unclear whether a single inflation mechanism is enough to explain the entire distribution of radii, or…

Hot Jupiters receive intense irradiation from their stellar hosts. The resulting extreme environments in their atmospheres allow us to study the conditions that drive planetary atmospheric dynamics, e.g., global-scale winds. General…

Planet formation theories predict a large but still undetected population of short-period terrestrial planets orbiting brown dwarfs. Should specimens of this population be discovered transiting relatively bright and nearby brown dwarfs, the…

Jupiter-mass planets with large semi-major axes ($a > 1.0$ AU) occur at a higher rate around evolved intermediate mass stars. There is a pronounced paucity of close-in ($a < 0.6$ AU), intermediate period ($5 < P < 100$ days), low-mass…

In the late stages of accretion leading up to the formation of planetesimals, particles grew to pebbles the size of 1-mm to tens of cm. That is the same size range that dominates the present-day comet mass loss. Meteoroids that size cause…

Short-period gas giants (hot Jupiters) on circular orbits are expected to be tidally locked into synchronous rotation, with permanent daysides that face their host stars, and permanent nightsides that face the darkness of space. Thermal…