Related papers: The hazard from fragmenting comets

The increasing population of objects in geostationary orbit has raised concerns about the potential risks posed by debris clouds resulting from fragmentation. The short-term evolution and associated hazards of debris generated by collisions…

We identify a sample of 27 long-period comets for which both non-gravitational accelerations and Lyman-alpha based gas production rates are available. Seven of the 27 comets (i.e. 25 percent) did not survive perihelion because of nucleus…

Comets are primitive objects that formed in the protoplanetary disk, and have been largely preserved over the history of the Solar System. However, they are not pristine, and surfaces of cometary nuclei do evolve. In order to understand the…

We examine the possibility that a nearby supernova explosion could have caused one or more of the mass extinctions identified by palaeontologists. We discuss the likely rate of such events in the light of the recent identification of…

Many exoplanets in close-in orbits are observed to have relatively high eccentricities and large stellar obliquities. We explore the possibility that these result from planet-planet scattering by studying the dynamical outcomes from a large…

Models of the zodiacal cloud's thermal emission and sporadic meteoroids suggest Jupiter-family comets (JFCs) as the dominant source of interplanetary dust. However, comet sublimation is insufficient to sustain the quantity of dust presently…

The orbital evolution of more than 22000 Jupiter-crossing objects under the gravitational influence of planets was investigated. We found that the mean collision probabilities of Jupiter-crossing objects (from initial orbits close to the…

A recent paper by Siraj & Loeb (2021) entitled "Breakup of a long-period comet as the origin of the dinosaur extinction" attempts to revive the perennial debate about what type of body hit the Earth 66 million years ago, triggering the…

The absolute magnitude and perihelion distributions of long-period comets are derived, using data from the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey. The results are surprising in three ways. Firstly, the flux of comets through…

The processes leading deformation and destruction of planets spiraling into the convective envelope of their host stars are described. The planet is compressed by the ram pressure, and deformed into a flattened shape for which a…

Late-type galaxies falling into a cluster would evolve being influenced by the interactions with both the cluster and the nearby cluster member galaxies. Most numerical studies, however, tend to focus on the effects of the former with…

We integrated the orbital evolution of 30,000 Jupiter-family comets, 1300 resonant asteroids, and 7000 asteroidal, trans-Neptunian, and cometary dust particles. For initial orbital elements of bodies close to those of Comets 2P, 10P, 44P,…

Drain away the earth's oceans and a global pattern of great ridges appears. Adjacent to these continental and undersea mountain ranges are layers of silt and clay, so thick that they fill the gaps between ridges, creating extensive…

We discuss the connection between the chemistry of dense interstellar clouds and those characteristics of cometary matter that could be remnants of it. The chemical evolution observed to occur in molecular clouds is summarized and a model…

Everyday thousands of meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere. The vast majority burn up harmlessly during the descent, but the larger objects survive, occasionally experiencing intense fragmentation events, and reach the ground. These…

We investigate the effect of fragmentation on the homogeneous free cooling of inelastic hard spheres, using Boltzmann kinetic theory and Direct Monte Carlo simulations. We analyze in detail a model where dissipative collisions may…

The final stage of planet formation is dominated by collisions between planetary embryos. The dynamics of this stage determine the orbital configuration and the mass and composition of planets in the system. In the solar system, late giant…

Theories of how galaxies, the fundamental constituents of large-scale structure, form and evolve have undergone a dramatic paradigm shift in the last few decades. Earlier views were of rapid, early collapse and formation of basic…

A nearby supernova (SN) explosion could have negatively influenced life on Earth, maybe even been responsible for mass extinctions. Mass extinction poses a significant extinction of numerous species on Earth, as recorded in the…

We present observations of the disintegrating long-period comet C/2019 J2 (Palomar) taken to determine the nature of the object and the cause of its demise. The data are consistent with break-up of a sub-kilometer nucleus into a debris…