Related papers: Origin and dynamical evolution of the asteroid bel…
The solar system was most likely born in a star cluster containing at least 1000 stars. It is highly probable that this cluster environment influenced various properties of the solar system like its chemical composition, size and the…
Jupiter and Saturn formed in a few million years (Haisch et al. 2001) from a gas-dominated protoplanetary disk, and were susceptible to gas-driven migration of their orbits on timescales of only ~100,000 years (Armitage 2007). Hydrodynamic…
No planets exist inside the orbit of Mercury and the terrestrial planets of the solar system exhibit a localized configuration. According to thermal structure calculation of protoplanetary disks, a silicate condensation line (~ 1300 K) is…
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…
So far, multiple stellar systems harbor more than 130 extra solar planets. Dynamical simulations show that the outcome of planetary formation process can lead to various planetary architecture (i.e. location, size, mass and water content)…
A bombardment of comets is thought to have occurred in the inner solar system as a result of a dynamical instability among the giant planets after gas disk dispersal. Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the main asteroid belt, likely…
The size distribution of asteroids in the solar system suggests that they formed top-down, with 100-1000 km bodies forming from the gravitational collapse of dense clumps of small solid particles. We investigate the conditions under which…
The origin of the orbital structure of the cold component of the Kuiper belt is still a hot subject of investigation. Several features of the solar system suggest that the giant planets underwent a phase of global dynamical instability, but…
The great diversity of extrasolar planetary systems has challenged our understanding of how planets form, and how their orbits evolve as they form. Among the various processes that may account for this diversity, the gravitational…
The majority of binary star systems that host exoplanets will spend the first portion of their lives within a star-forming cluster that may drive dynamical evolution of the binary-planet system. We perform numerical simulations of S-type…
The present dynamical configuration of planets in binary star systems may not reflect their formation process since the binary orbit may have changed in the past after the planet formation process was completed. An observed binary system…
Our understanding of planet formation has been rapidly evolving in recent years. The classical planet formation theory, developed when the only known planetary system was our own Solar System, has been revised to account for the observed…
The dynamical structure of the Solar System can be explained by a period of orbital instability experienced by the giant planets. While a late instability was originally proposed to explain the Late Heavy Bombardment, recent work favors an…
We use the current orbital structure of large (>50km) asteroids in the main asteroid belt to constrain the evolution of the giant planets when they migrated from their primordial orbits to their current ones. Minton & Malhotra (2009) showed…
The rotational distribution of asteroids as a function of their size is used {as a diagnostic of} their physical properties and evolution. Recent photometric surveys from the Gaia mission, allowing observation of asteroids with long spin…
Possible connections between the physical properties of Near-Earth Asteroids (NEA) and their orbital evolution were explored, with emphasis on binary asteroids. Our main starting hypothesis, suggested from the observations, was that the NEA…
Planet formation encompasses processes that span a remarkable 40 magnitudes in mass, ranging from collisions between micron-sized grains inherited from the ISM to the accretion of gas by giant planets. The planet formation process takes…
Our current understanding of the stellar initial mass function and massive star evolution suggests that young globular clusters may have formed hundreds to thousands of stellar-mass black holes, the remnants of stars with initial masses…
Here we show an example of a young asteroid cluster located in a dynamically stable region, which was produced by partial disruption of a primitive body about 30 km in size. We estimate its age to be only 1.9 +/- 0.3 Myr, thus its…
Accumulation of dust and ice particles into planetesimals is an important step in the planet formation process. Planetesimals are the seeds of both terrestrial planets and the solid cores of gas and ice giants forming by core accretion.…