Related papers: Forming Mercury by Giant Impacts
Mercury's crust has a complex structure resulting from a billion years of volcanism. The surface variations in chemical composition have been identified from orbit by the spacecraft MESSENGER. Combining these measurements with laboratory…
The Earth's Moon is thought to have formed from a circumterrestrial disk generated by a giant impact between the proto-Earth and an impactor approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Since the impact was energetic, the disk would have been hot…
In our solar system, Mars-sized protoplanets frequently collided with each other during the last stage of terrestrial planet formation called the giant impact stage. Giant impacts eject a large amount of material from the colliding…
The Moon exhibits striking geological asymmetries in elevation, crustal thickness, and composition between its nearside and farside. Although several scenarios have been proposed to explain these asymmetries, their origin remains debated.…
Mercury, due to its close location to the Sun, is surrounded by an environment whose conditions may be considered as "extreme" in the entire Solar System. Both solar wind and radiation are stronger with respect to other Solar System bodies,…
Past studies have revealed the dependency of the disc parameters (mass, radius, viscosity, grain fragmentation velocity, dust-to-gas ratio) on the formation of giant planets, where more massive discs seem beneficial for giant planet…
Measures of exoplanet bulk densities indicate that small exoplanets with radius less than 3 Earth radii ($R_\oplus$) range from low-density sub-Neptunes containing volatile elements to higher density rocky planets with Earth-like or…
Almost all the planets of our solar system have moons. Each planetary system has however unique characteristics. The Martian system has not one single big moon like the Earth, not tens of moons of various sizes like for the giant planets,…
During planet formation, numerous small impacting bodies result in cratering impacts on large target bodies. A fraction of the target surface is eroded, while a fraction of the impactor material accretes onto the surface. These fractions…
Systems of close-in super-Earths display striking diversity in planetary bulk density and composition. Giant impacts are expected to play a role in the formation of many of these worlds. Previous works, focused on the mechanical shock…
Gas giants orbiting interior to the ice line are thought to have been displaced from their formation locations by processes that remain debated. Here we uncover several new metallicity trends, which together may indicate that two competing…
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,…
Collisions between giant molecular clouds (GMCs) are one of the pathways for massive star formation, due to the high densities created. However the enhancement of the star formation rate (SFR) is not well constrained. In this study we…
The exploration of carbon-to-oxygen ratios has yielded intriguing insights into the composition of close-in giant exoplanets, giving rise to a distinct classification: carbon-rich planets, characterized by a carbon-to-oxygen ratio $\ge$ 1…
High resolution images of Mercury's surface, from the MESSENGER spacecraft, reveal many bright deposits associated with irregular, shallow, rimless depressions whose origins were attributed to volatile-related activity, but absent…
The trends of chemical abundances and abundance ratios observed in stars of different ages, kinematics, and metallicities bear the imprints of several physical processes that concur to shape the host galaxy properties. By inspecting these…
The Earth, Venus, Mars, and some extrasolar terrestrial planets have a mass and radius that is consistent with a mass fraction of about 30% metallic core and 70% silicate mantle. At the inner frontier of the solar system, Mercury has a…
More than a half of asteroids in the main belt have irregular shapes with the ratios of the minor to major axis lengths less than 0.6. One of the mechanisms to create such shapes is collisions between asteroids. The relationship between…
With the goal of confirming the metallicity ``excess'' observed in stars with planetary mass companions, we have conducted a high-precision spectroscopic study of a ``comparison'' sample of dwarfs included in the CORALIE extra-solar planet…
We quantify the atmospheric mass loss during planet formation by examining the contributions to atmospheric loss from both giant impacts and planetesimal accretion. Giant impacts cause global motion of the ground. Using analytic…