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The late stages of terrestrial planet formation are dominated by giant impacts that collectively influence the growth, composition and habitability of any planets that form. Hitherto, numerical models designed to explore these late stage…
In the canonical model of Moon formation, a Mars-sized protoplanet "Theia" collides with proto-Earth at close to their mutual escape velocity $v_{\rm esc}$ and a common impact angle 45{\deg}. The "graze-and-merge" collision strands a…
Current lunar origin scenarios suggest that Earth's Moon may have resulted from the merger of two (or more) smaller moonlets. Dynamical studies of multiple moons find that these satellite systems are not stable, resulting in moonlet…
Understanding chondrule formation provides invaluable clues about the origin of the solar system. Recent studies suggest that planetesimal collisions and the resulting impact melts are promising for forming chondrules. Given that the…
In order to examine the ``giant impact hypothesis'' for the Moon formation, we run the first grid-based, high-resolution hydrodynamic simulations for an impact between proto-Earth and a proto-planet. The spatial resolution for the…
Orbital evolution is a critical process that sculpts planetary systems, particularly during their early stages where planet-disk interactions are expected to lead to the formation of resonant chains. Despite the theoretically expected…
The formation of the Moon from the debris of a slow and grazing giant impact of a Mars-sized impactor on the proto-Earth (Cameron & Ward 1976, Canup & Asphaug 2001) is widely accepted today. We present an alternative scenario with a…
The long-term dynamical future of the Sun's planets has been simulated and statistically analyzed in great detail, but most prior work considers the solar system as completely isolated, neglecting the potential influence of field star…
The modestly eccentric and non-coplanar orbits of the giant planets pose a challenge to solar system formation theories which generally indicate that the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk in nearly perfectly circular and…
Almost all the planets of our solar system have moons. Each planetary system has however unique characteristics. The Martian system has not one single big moon like the Earth, not tens of moons of various sizes like for the giant planets,…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between several giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities would…
According to the giant impact theory, the Moon formed through accreting the debris disk produced by a collision between Theia and the proto-Earth, and the predicted lunar orbital inclination relative to the Earth's equatorial plane is about…
Of the solar system's four terrestrial planets, the origin of Mercury is perhaps the most mysterious. Modern numerical simulations designed to model the dynamics of terrestrial planet formation systematically fail to replicate Mercury;…
We study the evolution of debris created in the giant impacts expected during the final stages of terrestrial planet formation. The starting point is the debris created in a simulation of the Moon-forming impact. The dynamical evolution is…
The Earth's Moon is thought to have formed from a circumterrestrial disk generated by a giant impact between the proto-Earth and an impactor approximately 4.5 billion years ago. Since the impact was energetic, the disk would have been hot…
The final stage of planet formation is dominated by collisions between planetary embryos. The dynamics of this stage determine the orbital configuration and the mass and composition of planets in the system. In the solar system, late giant…
The origin of Mercury's high iron-to-rock ratio is still unknown. In this work we investigate Mercury's formation via giant impacts and consider the possibilities of a single giant impact, a hit-and-run, and multiple collisions in one…
It is generally accepted that the Moon accreted from the disk formed by an impact between the proto-Earth and impactor, but its details are highly debated. Some models suggest that a Mars-sized impactor formed a silicate melt-rich…
The observed population of Hot Jupiters displays a stunning variety of physical properties, including a wide range of densities and core sizes for a given planetary mass. Motivated by the observational sample, this paper studies the…
The leading hypothesis for the origin of the Moon, that of a single giant impact, faces significant challenges. These include either the need for an impactor with a near-identical composition to Earth or an extremely high-mass or…