Related papers: Dynamical Constraints on Mercury's Collisional Ori…
During the late stage of planet formation when Mars-size cores appear, interactions among planetary cores can excite their orbital eccentricities, speed their merges and thus sculpture the final architecture of planet systems. This series…
Mercury is the only other terrestrial planet in the solar system with an active dynamo magnetic field (~200 nT at the equatorial surface). Furthermore, Mercury's ~3.9-3.7 billion-year old (Ga) crust is strongly magnetized (~10 nT at ~30-km…
A circumsolar dust ring has been recently discovered close to the orbit of Mercury. There are currently no hypotheses for the origin of this ring in the literature, so we explore four different origin scenarios here: the dust originated…
The final sizes, composition, and angular momenta of solid planetary bodies depend on the outcomes of collisions between planetary embryos. The most common numerical method for simulating embryo collisions is to combine a gravity solver…
High-multiplicity Kepler systems (referred to as Kepler multis) are often tightly packed and may be on the verge of instability. Many systems of this type could have experienced past instabilities, where the compact orbits and often low…
The dynamical evolution of terrestrial planets resembling Mercury in the vicinity of spin-orbit resonances is investigated using comprehensive harmonic expansions of the tidal torque taking into account the frequency-dependent quality…
Due to the chaotic nature of the Solar System, the question of its long-term stability can only be answered in a statistical sense, for instance, based on numerical ensemble integrations of nearby orbits. Destabilization of the inner…
This work describes new dynamical simulations of terrestrial planet formation. The simulations started at the protoplanetary disk stage, when planetesimals formed and accreted into protoplanets, and continued past the late stage of giant…
The planet Mercury possesses a small but highly dynamic magnetosphere in which the role and dynamics of electrons are still largely unknown. We aim at modeling the global dynamics of solar wind electrons impinging on Mercury's…
The process leading to the formation of the terrestrial planet remains elusive. In a previous publication, we have shown that, if the first generation of planetesimals forms in a ring at about 1 AU and the gas disk's density peaks at the…
Due to their strong resonances with their host planet, Trojan asteroids can remain in stable orbits for billions of years. As a result, they are powerful probes for constraining the dynamical and chemical history of the solar system.…
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…
Placing the architecture of the Solar System within the broader context of planetary architectures is one of the primary topics of interest within planetary science. Exoplanet discoveries have revealed a large range of system architectures,…
Mercury's eccentricity is chaotic and can increase so much that collisions with Venus or the Sun become possible (Laskar, 1989, 1990, 1994, 2008, Batygin & Laughlin, 2008, Laskar & Gastineau, 2009). This chaotic behavior results from an…
The orbit of Mercury has large values of eccentricity and inclination that cannot be easily explained if this planet formed on a circular and coplanar orbit. Here, we study the evolution of Mercury's orbit during the instability related to…
MESSENGER magnetometer data show that Mercury's magnetic field is not only exceptionally weak but also has a unique geometry. The internal field resembles an axial dipole that is offset to the North by 20% of the planetary radius. This…
Our Solar system is almost entirely devoid of material interior to Mercury's orbit, in sharp contrast to the multiple Earth masses of material commonly residing within the analogous region of extrasolar planetary systems. Recent work has…
Planets between 1-4 Earth radii with orbital periods <100 days are strikingly common. The migration model proposes that super-Earths migrate inwards and pile up at the disk inner edge in chains of mean motion resonances. After gas disk…
The planet Mercury is locked in a spin-orbit resonance where it rotates three times about its spin axis for every two orbits about the Sun. The current explanation for this unique state assumes that the initial rotation of this planet was…
We review the problem of the formation of terrestrial planets, with particular emphasis on the interaction of dynamical and geochemical models. The lifetime of gas around stars in the process of formation is limited to a few million years…