Related papers: Chondrules from high-velocity collisions: thermal …
This paper reviews coagulation models for planet formation in the Kuiper Belt, emphasizing links to recent observations of our and other solar systems. At heliocentric distances of 35-50 AU, single annulus and multiannulus planetesimal…
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…
The porosity of an asteroid is important when studying the evolution of our solar system through small bodies and for planning mitigation strategies to avoid disasters due to asteroid impacts. Our knowledge of asteroid porosity largely…
We investigate the origins of cold sub-Saturns (CSS), an exoplanetary population inferred from microlensing surveys. If confirmed, these planets would rebut a theorised gap in planets' mass distribution between those of Neptune and Jupiter…
Young massive clusters (YMCs) are recently formed astronomical objects with unusually high star formation rates. We propose the collision of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) as a likely formation mechanism of YMCs, consistent with the YMC…
Formation of the first planetesimals remains an unsolved problem. Growth by sticking must initiate the process, but multiple studies have revealed a series of barriers that can slow or stall growth, most of them due to nebula turbulence. In…
We study the stability of a hot saturated gas coexisting with condensed particles in an optically thin medium. Such a situation may obtain downstream of a shock, at condensation fronts, or in vaporizing impacts. We show that the…
The planet candidate Fomalhaut b is bright in optical light but undetected in longer wavelengths, requiring a large, reflective dust cloud. The most recent observations find an extremely eccentric orbit (e ~ 0.8), indicating that Fomalhaut…
High-velocity clouds consist of cold gas that appears to be raining down from the halo to the disc of the Milky Way. Over the past fifty years, two competing scenarios have attributed their origin either to gas accretion from outside the…
Kuiper belt objects, such as Arrokoth, the probable progenitors of short-period comets, formed and evolved at large heliocentric distances, where the ambient temperatures appear to be sufficiently low for preserving volatile ices. By…
By analyzing the gas temperature maps created from the Chandra archive data, we reveal the prevailing existence of temperature substructures on ~100 kpc scales in the central regions of nine intermediate-redshift (z~0.1) galaxy clusters,…
There is currently debate over whether the dust content of planetary systems is stochastically regenerated or originates in planetesimal belts evolving in steady state. In this paper a simple model for the steady state evolution of debris…
Explaining the unexpected presence of dune-like patterns at the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko requires conceptual and quantitative advances in the understanding of surface and outgassing processes. We show here that vapor…
Debris disks around main-sequence stars are believed to derive from planetesimal populations that have accreted at early epochs and survived possible planet formation processes. While debris disks must contain solids in a broad range of…
Several pieces of evidence suggest that silicate grains in primitive meteorites are not interstellar grains but condensates formed in the early solar system. Moreover, the size distribution of matrix grains in chondrites implies that these…
Warm debris disks are a sub-sample of the large population of debris disks, and display excess emission in the mid-IR. Around solar-type stars, very few objects show emission features in mid-IR spectroscopic observations, that are…
The zodiacal cloud is a thick circumsolar disk of small debris particles produced by asteroid collisions and comets. Here, we present a zodiacal cloud model based on the orbital properties and lifetimes of comets and asteroids, and on the…
Chemical and chronological information preserved in meteorites permits the reconstruction of events and processes in the solar nebula from the formation of the first solids to the accretion of planetary bodies and their subsequent…
Large Kuiper Belt Objects are conventionally thought to have formed out of a massive planetesimal belt that is a few thousand times its current mass. Such a picture, however, is incompatible with multiple lines of evidence. Here, we present…
Research over the past four decades has shown a rich variety of complex organic molecular content in some meteorites. This current study is an attempt to gain a better insight into the thermal conditions experienced by these molecules…