Related papers: Collisional heating and compaction of small bodies…
Recent structure models of Jupiter suggest the existence of an extended region in the deep interior with a high heavy element abundance, referred to as a dilute core. This finding has led to increased interest in modelling the formation and…
Metallic bodies that were the cores of differentiated bodies are sources of iron meteorites and are considered to have formed early in the terrestrial planet region before migrating to the main asteroid belt. Surface temperatures and mutual…
Owing to the extremely low gravity of small near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), it has been assumed that impact-generated rock fragments escape into space and thus do not contribute to the accumulation of regolith. However, centimeter-sized stones…
We study the destruction and modification of icy interstellar objects by cosmic rays and gas collisions. Using the cosmic-ray flux measured in the local interstellar medium as well as inferred from gamma-ray observations at the different…
We investigated fundamental processes of collisional sticking and fragmentation of dust aggregates by carrying out N-body simulations of submicron-sized icy dust monomers. We examined the condition for collisional growth of two colliding…
Icy planetesimals are likely to supply volatiles to terrestrial planets and serve as building blocks of icy bodies in the outer Solar System. Samples from the C-type asteroid Ryugu, collected by the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft, indicate a…
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,…
The small bodies in the Kuiper Belt region of the distant Solar System are leftovers from planet formation. Their orbital distribution today tells us about how giant planets migrated, while their surface properties, shapes, and sizes tell…
Collisions that induce melting and vaporization can have a substantial effect on the thermal and geochemical evolution of planets. However, the thermodynamics of major minerals are not well known at the extreme conditions attained during…
Massive stars can end their lives with a successful supernova explosion (leaving behind a neutron star or, more rarely, a black hole), or a failed explosion that leaves behind a black hole. The density structure of the pre-collapse…
Radioisotopic ages for meteorites and their components provide constraints on the evolution of small bodies: timescales of accretion, thermal and aqueous metamorphism, differentiation, cooling and impact metamorphism. Realising that the…
The debate over whether kilometer-sized solids, or planetesimals, assemble by collision-induced chemical sticking or by gravity-driven unstable modes remains unsettled. In light of recent work showing that gravitational growth can occur…
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…
Planetisimals are thought to be formed from the solid material of a protoplanetary disk by a process of dust aggregation. It is not known how growth proceeds to kilometre sizes, but it has been proposed that water ice beyond the snowline…
We studied impact processes by means of smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. The method was applied to modeling formation of main-belt families during the cometary bombardment (either early or late, ${\sim}\,3.85\,{\rm Gy}$…
Sub-Neptune planets are very common in our galaxy and show a large diversity in their mass-radius relation. In sub-Neptunes most of the planet mass is in the rocky part (hereafter core) which is surrounded by a modest hydrogen-helium…
Gravitationally unstable disks can fragment and form bound objects provided that their cooling time is short. In protoplanetary disks radiative cooling is likely to be too slow to permit formation of planets by fragmentation within several…
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…
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.…
The nucleosynthetic heterogeneity between different asteroids and planets is well established. These isotopic variations manifest themselves at the part per millions level or larger, in isotopes that were synthesised in various stellar…