Related papers: Meteors: Light from Comets and Asteroids
Meteoroids impacting the Earth on a daily basis are fragments of asteroids and comets. By studying fireballs produced during their disintegration in the atmosphere, we can gain information about their source regions and the properties of…
The arrival of solid particles from outside our solar system would present us with an invaluable source of scientific information. Attempts to detect such interstellar particles among the meteors observed in Earth's atmosphere have almost…
Comets, asteroids and moons that orbit stars and planets exterior to our solar system are prefixed with "exo". While the existence of these objects is certain, our understanding of their physical properties, composition, and diversity is…
Recent observations of small bodies of the Solar System showed evidence of the presence of refractory (asteroidal) material in the Oort cloud. Different models of the origin of the Solar System predict different numbers of rocky objects in…
<Abridged> The impact of a meteoroid onto an asteroid transfers linear and angular momentum to the larger body, which may affect its orbit and its rotational state. Here we show that the meteoroid environment of our Solar System can have an…
Radar and spacecraft observations show the permanently shadowed regions around Mercury's North Pole to contain water ice and complex organic material. One possible source of this material are impacts by interplanetary dust particles (IDPs),…
The first interstellar object, `Oumuamua, was discovered in the Solar System by Pan-STARRS in 2017, allowing for a calibration of the impact rate of interstellar meteors of its size $\sim 100\;$m. The discovery of CNEOS 2014-01-08 allowed…
How do planetary systems, in general, and our own Solar System (SS), in particular, form? In conjunction, Astronomy and Isotope Cosmochemistry provide us with powerful tools to answer this age-old question. In this contribution, we review…
Every moment, countless meteoroids enter our atmosphere unseen. The detection and measurement of meteors offer the unique opportunity to gain insights into the composition of our solar systems' celestial bodies. Researchers, therefore,…
Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar System's Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is…
Comets hold answers to mysteries of the Solar System by recording presolar history, the initial states of planet formation and prebiotic organics and volatiles to the early Earth. Analysis of returned samples from a comet nucleus will…
In the late stages of accretion leading up to the formation of planetesimals, particles grew to pebbles the size of 1-mm to tens of cm. That is the same size range that dominates the present-day comet mass loss. Meteoroids that size cause…
[Abridged] Asteroid mining is not necessarily a distant prospect. Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx have recently rendezvoused with near-Earth asteroids and will return samples to Earth. While there is significant science motivation for these…
The stellar halo contains some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way galaxy and in the universe. The detections of `Oumuamua, CNEOS 2014-01-08, and interstellar dust serve to calibrate the production rate of interstellar objects. We study…
Despite the large amount of high quality data generated in recent space encounters with asteroids, the majority of our knowledge about these objects comes from ground based observations. Asteroids travelling in orbits that are potentially…
Meteors carry important and indispensable information about the interplanetary environment, which can be used to understand the origin and evolution of our solar system. We have developed a Multi-station Meteor Monitoring ($\rm M^3$) system…
Essentially everything of astronomical interest is either part of a galaxy, or from a galaxy, or otherwise relevant to the origin or evolution of galaxies. Diverse examples are that the isotropic composition of meteorites provides clues to…
A detailed study of comets active at large heliocentric distances (greater than 4 au) which enter the Solar System for the first time and are composed of matter in its elementary, unprocessed state, would help in our understanding of the…
As comets journey into the inner solar system, they deliver particulates and volatile gases into their comae that reveal the most primitive materials in the solar system. Cometary dust particles provide crucial information for assessing the…
The asteroid belt is a unique source of information on some of the most important questions facing solar system science. These questions include the sizes, numbers, types and orbital distributions of the planetesimals that formed the…