Related papers: Rubble Pile Asteroids
Many small bodies in the solar system are believed to be rubble piles, a collection of smaller elements separated by voids. We propose a model for the structure of a self-gravitating rubble pile. Static friction prevents its elements from…
The implication of small amounts of cohesion within relatively small rubble pile asteroids is investigated with regard to their evolution under the persistent presence of the YORP effect. We find that below a characteristic size, which is a…
Most asteroids with a diameter larger than $\sim 300 \ {\rm m}$ are rubble piles i.e. consisting of more than one solid object. All asteroids are rotating but almost all asteroids larger than $\sim 300 \ {\rm m}$ rotate with a period longer…
Most main-belt asteroids are primitive rock and metal bodies in orbit about the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Disruption, through high velocity collisions or rotational spin-up, is believed to be the primary mechanism for the production and…
The rubble pile spin barrier is an upper limit on the rotation rate of asteroids larger than ~200-300 m. Among thousands of asteroids with diameters larger than ~300 m, only a handful of asteroids are known to rotate faster than 2.0 h, all…
Solar system small bodies come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, which are achieved following very individual evolutional paths through billions of years. This paper focuses on the reshaping process of rubble-pile asteroids driven by…
Satellites around large asteroids are preferentially found among those with the most rapid rotation and elongated shape. The taxonomic statistics are similarly skewed; in total, 13 asteroids larger than 100 km are known to have satellites,…
In the past decade, the number of known binary near-Earth asteroids has more than quadrupled and the number of known large main belt asteroids with satellites has doubled. Half a dozen triple asteroids have been discovered, and the…
The rotational distribution of asteroids as a function of their size is used {as a diagnostic of} their physical properties and evolution. Recent photometric surveys from the Gaia mission, allowing observation of asteroids with long spin…
Asteroids and meteorites provide key evidence on the formation of planetesimals in the Solar System. Asteroids are traditionally thought to form in a bottom-up process by coagulation within a population of initially km-scale planetesimals.…
A statistical analysis of brightness variability of asteroids reveals how their shapes evolve from elongated to rough spheroidal forms, presumably driven by impact-related phenomena. Based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Moving Object…
The asteroid belt contains less than a thousandth of Earth's mass and is radially segregated, with S-types dominating the inner belt and C-types the outer belt. It is generally assumed that the belt formed with far more mass and was later…
There is increasing evidence that many km-sized bodies in the Solar System are piles of rubble bound together by gravity. We present results from a project to map the parameter space of collisions between km-sized spherical rubble piles.…
A collisional family is a collection of >km-size asteroid fragments produced by a large scale collision between asteroids. Here we cataloged 335 notable collisional families in the main asteroid belt. When possible, we estimated each…
An asteroid pair consists of two unbound objects with almost identical heliocentric orbital elements that were formed when a single "rubble pile" asteroid failed to remain bound against an increasing rotation rate. Models suggest that the…
The under-abundance of asteroids on orbits with small perihelion distances suggests that thermally-driven disruption may be an important process in the removal of rocky bodies in the Solar System. Here we report our study of how the debris…
The distribution of heavy elements is anomalously low in the asteroid main belt region compared with elsewhere in the solar system. Observational surveys also indicate a deficit in the number of small ($ \le 50$~km size) asteroids that is…
We explore the hypothesis that, due to small van der Waals forces between constituent grains, small rubble pile asteroids have a small but non-zero cohesive strength. The nature of this model predicts that the cohesive strength should be…
This study examines the rotational characteristics of asteroids through statistical modeling of the diameter-period relationship. A statistical evaluation of the diameter-period relationship was conducted using a dataset of 34,326…
All the four giant planets in our Solar System have rings, but their characteristics are very different. The rings consist of a number of small particles, although individual particles have not been directly imaged. Near the central planet,…