Related papers: Boulders on Mercury
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…
Statistical analyses of large surveys for transiting planets such as the Kepler mission must account for systematic errors and biases. Transit detection depends not only on the planet's radius and orbital period, but also on host star…
Computing the tidal deformations of Mars, we explored various Mars internal structures by examining profiles that include or exclude a basal molten layer within the mantle and a solid inner core. By assessing their compatibility with a…
Multiple impact basins formed on the Moon about 3.8 Gyr ago in what is known as the lunar cataclysm or late heavy bombardment. Many workers currently interpret the lunar cataclysm as an impact spike primarily caused by main-belt asteroids…
The engulfment of planets by their host stars is an expected outcome of various dynamical processes and has been invoked to explain a variety of observed stellar properties, such as rapid rotation, chemical abundance abnormalities, and…
Since white dwarfs are small, the contrast between the thermal emission of an orbiting object and a white dwarf is dramatically enhanced compared to a main sequence host. Furthermore, rocky objects much smaller than the moon have no…
In this paper we present a crater age determination of several terrains associated with the Raditladi and Rachmaninoff basins. These basins were discovered during the first and third MESSENGER flybys of Mercury, respectively. One of the…
Planets and the stars they orbit are born from the same cloud of gas and dust, and the primordial compositions of rocky exoplanets have been assumed to have iron and refractory abundance ratios consistent with their host star. To test this…
Video observations of Jupiter obtained by amateur astronomers over the past eight years have shown five flashes of light of 1-2 s. The first three of these events occurred on 3 June 2010, 20 August 2010, and 10 September 2012. Previous…
The Moon exhibits striking geological asymmetries in elevation, crustal thickness, and composition between its nearside and farside. Although several scenarios have been proposed to explain these asymmetries, their origin remains debated.…
The Kepler Mission has discovered thousands of planets with radii $<4\ R_\oplus$, paving the way for the first statistical studies of the dynamics, formation, and evolution of these sub-Neptunes and super-Earths. Planetary masses are an…
During planet formation, numerous small impacting bodies result in cratering impacts on large target bodies. A fraction of the target surface is eroded, while a fraction of the impactor material accretes onto the surface. These fractions…
The formation of satellites is thought to be a natural by-product of planet formation in our Solar System, and thus, moons of extrasolar planets (exomoons) may be abundant in extrasolar planetary systems, as well. Exomoons have yet to be…
The planet Mercury possesses an anomalously large iron core, and a correspondingly high bulk density. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed in order to explain such a large iron content. A long-standing idea holds that Mercury once…
This paper presents synthetic observations of long-lived, coorbiting asteroids of Mercury, Venus, the Earth and Mars. Our sample is constructed by taking the limiting semimajor axes, differential longitudes and inclinations for long-lived…
Many small boulders with reflectance values higher than 1.5 times the average reflectance have been found on the near-Earth asteroid 162173 Ryugu. Based on their visible wavelength spectral differences, Tatsumi et al. (2021) defined two…
Space weathering is an important surface process occurring on the Moon and other airless bodies, especially those that have no magnetic field. The optical effects of the Moon's space weathering have been largely investigated in the…
The field of extrasolar planets has rapidly expanded to include the detection of planets with masses smaller than that of Uranus. Many of these are expected to have little or no hydrogen and helium gas and we might find Earth analogs among…
With the progress of detection techniques, the number of low-mass and small-size exoplanets is increasing rapidly. However their characteristics and formation mechanisms are not yet fully understood. The metallicity of the host star is a…
The orbital eccentricity-radius relation for small planets is indicative of the predominant dynamical sculpting processes during late-stage orbital evolution. Previous studies have shown that planets orbiting Sun-like stars exhibit an…