Related papers: The hazard from fragmenting comets
Star formation is spatially clustered across a range of environments, from dense stellar clusters to unbound associations. As a result, radiative or dynamical interactions with neighbouring stars disrupt (proto)planetary systems and limit…
Much of the Earth was built by high-energy impacts of planetesimals and embryos, many of these impactors already differentiated, with metallic cores of their own. Geochemical data provide critical information on the timing of accretion and…
It is observed that hypervelocity space dust, which is continuously bombarding the Earth, creates immense momentum flows in the atmosphere. Some of this fast space dust inevitably will interact with the atmospheric system, transferring…
A small quantum system within the gravitational field of a massive body will be entangled with the quantum degrees of freedom of the latter. Hence, the massive body acts as an environment, and it induces non-unitary dynamics, noise, and…
A large fraction of stars are formed in dense clusters. In the cluster, close encounters between stars at distances less than 100 au are common. It has been shown that during close encounters planets can transfer between stars. Such…
In current $\Lambda$CDM galaxy formation scenarios, at least three physical phenomena could contribute to the mass assembly: monolithic collapse, hierarchical mergers and more quiescent external gas accretion, with secular evolution. The…
The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies. Current observational results in our galaxy provide a complex physical and chemical…
We numerically investigate the migration of dust particles with initial orbits close to those of the numbered asteroids, observed trans-Neptunian objects, and Comet Encke. The fraction of silicate asteroidal particles that collided with the…
Reconstructions of the paleoclimate indicate that ancient climatic fluctuations on Earth are often correlated with variations in its orbital elements. However, the chaos inherent in the solar system's orbital evolution prevents numerical…
The solar system is dusty, and would become dustier over time as asteroids collide and comets disintegrate, except that small debris particles in interplanetary space do not last long. They can be ejected from the solar system by Jupiter,…
Our solar system's path has recently been shown to potentially intersect dense interstellar clouds 2 and 7 million years ago: the Local Lynx of Cold Cloud and the edge of the Local Bubble. These clouds compressed the heliosphere, directly…
The high-density environment of galaxy clusters is ripe for collisional encounters of galaxies. While the large velocity dispersion of clusters was originally thought to preclude slow encounters, the infall of smaller groups into the…
The motion of bodies ejected from the Earth was studied, and the probabilities of collisions of such bodies with the present terrestrial planets were calculated. The dependences of these probabilities on velocities, angles and points of…
New data on the distribution of distant trans-Neptunian objects and on the properties of comets indicate the importance of dynamical processes in the outer part of the protoplanetary disk in the formation of the observed structure of the…
A fundamental question in cometary science is whether the different dynamical classes of comets have different chemical compositions, which would reflect different initial conditions. From the ground or Earth orbit, radio and infrared…
We have identified iridium in an ~5 m-thick section of pelagic sediment cored in the deep sea floor at Site 886C, in addition to a distinct spike in iridium at the K-Pg boundary related to the Chicxulub asteroid impact. We distinguish the…
Comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) reached perihelion at 0.33 au on 2025 October 8. Daily monitoring by the LCO Outbursting Objects Key Project revealed a major activity increase between November 2 and 4, accompanied by rapid changes in coma…
Mergers between galaxy clusters are an important stage in the formation of the large-scale structure of the Universe. Some of the mergers show a spectacular bow shock that formed as a result of recent passage of a smaller cluster through a…
Previous high resolution cosmological simulations predict the first stars to appear in the early universe to be very massive and to form in isolation. Here we discuss a cosmological simulation in which the central 50 solar mass clump breaks…
Glaciations were attributed to variations of the Earths orbit (Milankovitch cycles). But the best ever dated paleoclimatic record (from a speleothem from Devils Hole, Nevada) demonstrated that the end of the last glacial period (termination…