Related papers: Injection of Inner Oort Cloud Objects Into the Dis…
We investigate the prospects for the capture of the proposed Planet 9 from other stars in the Sun's birth cluster. Any capture scenario must satisfy three conditions: the encounter must be more distant than ~150 au to avoid perturbing the…
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…
Among the outer solar system minor planet orbits there is an observed gap in perihelion between roughly 50 and 65 au at eccentricities $e\gtrsim0.65$. Through a suite of observational simulations, we show that the gap arises from two…
The hypothesis of an additional planet in the outer Solar System has gained new support as a result of the confinement noted in the angular orbital elements of distant trans-Neptunian objects. Orbital parameters proposed for the external…
The presence of an unseen `Planet 9' on the outskirts of the Solar system has been invoked to explain the unexpected clustering of the orbits of several Edgeworth--Kuiper Belt Objects. We use $N$-body simulations to investigate the…
The six-degree obliquity of the sun suggests that either an asymmetry was present in the solar system's formation environment, or an external torque has misaligned the angular momentum vectors of the sun and the planets. However, the exact…
We used N-body simulations to model the 4.5 Gyr orbital evolution of the early Kuiper Belt, incorporating a massive protoplanetary disk, the four giant planets, and 1500 primordial Pluto-class bodies ("Plutos") that drove Neptune's grainy…
The discovery that many trans-neptunian objects exist in pairs, or binaries, is proving invaluable for shedding light on the formation, evolution and structure of the outer Solar system. Based on recent systematic searches it has been…
Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) are icy/rocky bodies that move beyond the orbit of Neptune in a region known as the trans-Neptunian belt (or Edgeworth-Kuiper belt). In contrast to the predictions of accretion models that feature…
Statistical analysis of the orbits of distant Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) have led to suggest that an additional planet should reside in the Solar System. According to recent models, the secular action of this body should cause orbital…
This work explores the orbital distribution of minor bodies in the outer Solar System emplaced as a result of a Nice model migration from the simulations of Brasser & Morbidelli (2013). This planetary migration scatters a planetesimal disk…
We study the dynamical properties of objects in hyperbolic orbits passing through the inner Solar system in the context of two different potential sources: interstellar space and the Oort cloud. We analytically derive the probability…
Born as ice-rich planetesimals, cometary nuclei were gravitationally scattered onto their current orbits in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud during the giant planets' dynamical instability in the early stages of our Solar System's…
A simple dynamical model is employed to study the possible orbital evolution of scattered planets and phase plane analysis is used to classify the parameter space and solutions. Our results reconfirm that there is always an increase in…
We report the results of dynamical simulations, covering Gyr timescales, of fictitious Scattered Disk Objects as a follow-up to an earlier study by Fern\'andez et al. (2004: {\it Icarus} {\bf 172}, 372). Our dynamical model is similar in…
We present a chronology of the formation and early evolution of the Oort cloud by simulations. These simulations start with the Solar System being born with planets and asteroids in a stellar cluster orbiting the Galactic center. Upon…
Disks of low-mass bodies on high-eccentricity orbits in near-Keplerian potentials can be dynamically unstable to buckling out of the plane. In this letter, we present $N$-body simulations of the long-term behavior of such a system, finding…
Planet formation is accompanied by the formation of comet clouds. In systems where planets migrate on rapid timescales, the diffusive evolution of comet orbits may stall, resulting in a comet cloud intermediate between a flattened Kuiper…
Outer satellites of the planets have distant, eccentric orbits that can be highly inclined or even retrograde relative to the equatorial planes of their planets. These irregular orbits cannot have formed by circumplanetary accretion and are…
Context. A recent observational census of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) has unveiled anomalous orbital structures. This has led to the hypothesis that an additional $\sim5-10~m_{\oplus}$ planet exists. This planet, known as Planet 9, occupies…