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The Centaurs are recent escapees from the Kuiper belt that are destined either to meet fiery oblivion in the hot inner regions of the Solar system or to be ejected to the interstellar medium by gravitational scattering from the giant…
There is a group of newly recognized asteroids in the main belt that are exhibiting cometary characteristics. We will call them Asteroidal Belt Comets or ABCs. An analysis of their orbital and physical properties has resulted in the…
Centaurs are minor planets thought to have originated in the outer Solar System region known as the Kuiper Belt. Active Centaurs enigmatically display comet-like features (e.g., tails, comae) even though they orbit in the gas giant region…
The mysterious solar system object 133P/(7968) Elst-Pizarro is dynamically asteroidal, yet displays recurrent comet-like dust emission. Two scenarios were hypothesized to explain this unusual behavior: (1) 133P is a classical comet from the…
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 Ursid meteor shower is an annual shower that usually shows little activity. However, its Zenith Hourly Rate sometimes increases, usually either when its parent comet, 8P/Tuttle, is close to its perihelion or its aphelion. Outbursts when…
Comets are icy objects that orbitally evolve from the trans-Neptunian region (the Kuiper belt and beyond) into the inner Solar System, where they are heated by solar radiation and become active due to sublimation of water ice. Here we…
We have analysed the orbits and ablation characteristics in the atmosphere of 59 earth-impacting fireballs, produced by meteoroids one meter in diameter or larger, described here as meter-scale. Using heights at peak luminosity as a proxy…
From two Active Asteroid (AA) known in 1979 we have advanced to 37 members at the beginning of 2019. More surprisingly, in the first three months of 2019 five new members were added to the list, one of them, 6478 Gault, with a curious, out…
Meteor clusters are typically defined as groups of meteors that appear close together in both space and time. To date, only a handful of such events have been recorded instrumentally and analysed in detail. In many documented cases, thermal…
We investigated the population of asteroids in comet-like orbits using available asteroid size and albedo catalogs of data taken with the Infrared Astronomical Satellite, AKARI, and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer on the basis of…
We present radiometric effective radii and visual geometric albedos for six asteroids in comet-like orbits. Our sample has three of the four known retrograde asteroids (1999 LE31, 2000 DG8, and 2000 HE46) and three objects ((18916) 2000…
We report on the results of a systematic search for associated asteroid families for all active asteroids known to date. We find that 10 out of 12 main-belt comets (MBCs) and 5 out of 7 disrupted asteroids are linked with known or candidate…
We apply a generalized Kepler map theory to describe the qualitative chaotic dynamics around cometary nuclei, based on accessible observational data for five comets whose nuclei are well-documented to resemble dumb-bells. The sizes of…
Jupiter family comets contribute a significant amount of debris to near-Earth space. However, telescopic observations of these objects seem to suggest they have short physical lifetimes. If this is true, the material generated will also be…
In the Nice model, the late heavy bombardment (LHB) is related to an orbital instability of giant planets which causes a fast dynamical dispersion of a transneptunian cometary disk. We study effects produced by these hypothetical cometary…
In February 15 2013 a medium-sized meteoroid impacted the atmosphere in the region of Chelyabinsk, Russia. After its entrance to the atmosphere and after travel by several hun- dred of kilometers the body exploded in a powerful event…
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 study of small ($<$300 m) near-Earth objects (NEOs) is important because they are more closely related than larger objects to the precursors of meteorites that fall on Earth. Collisions of these bodies with Earth are also more frequent.…
We present reflected light spectral observations from 0.4 to 2.5 micron of 24 asteroids chosen from the population of asteroids initially classified as Tholen X-type objects (Tholen, 1984). The X complex in the Tholen taxonomy comprises the…