Related papers: Boulders on Mercury
This work examines the plausibility of a lunar origin of natural objects that have a negative total energy (ET) with respect to the geocenter while within 3 Earth Hill radii (RH), a population that we will refer to as 'bound'. They are a…
The radius valley, i.e., a dearth of planets with radii between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii, provides insights into planetary formation and evolution. Using homogenously revised planetary parameters from Kepler 1-minute short cadence light…
The effects of lunar surface roughness, on both small and large scales, on Askaryan radio pulses generated by particle cascades beneath the lunar surface has never been fully estimated. Surface roughness affects the chances of a pulse…
Small craters of the lunar maria are observed to be in a state of equilibrium, in which the rate of production of new craters is, on average, equal to the rate of destruction of old craters. Crater counts of multiple lunar terrains over…
The observed presence of water molecules in the dayside lunar regolith was an unexpected discovery and remains poorly understood. Standard thermophysical models predict temperatures that are too high for adsorbed water to be stable. We…
Special Regions on Mars are defined as environments able to host liquid water that meets certain temperature and water activity requirements that allow known terrestrial organisms to replicate, and therefore could be habitable. Such regions…
The frequency and the characteristics of lunar impacting meteorites are reconsidered under the general assumption of belonging to the sporadic meteoroids. We develop the model for evaluating the luminous energy detected in the visual band…
Estimating surface properties such as porosity and grain sizes is key for planning lander missions and landing site selection on icy moons. However, spaceborne instruments do not measure the regolith properties directly: instead, they…
A main goal of NASA's Kepler Mission is to establish the frequency of potentially habitable Earth-size planets (eta Earth). Relatively few such candidates identified by the mission can be confirmed to be rocky via dynamical measurement of…
Motility is a ubiquitous feature of microbial life on Earth, and is widely regarded as a promising biosignature candidate. In the search for motile organisms, it is therefore valuable to have rough estimates for the number of such microbes…
Recently, the Kepler spacecraft has detected a sizable aggregate of objects, characterized by giant-planet-like radii and modest levels of stellar irradiation. With the exception of a handful of objects, the physical nature, and…
The formation of the four terrestrial planets of the solar system is one of the most fundamental problems in the planetary sciences. However, the formation of Mercury remains poorly understood. We investigated terrestrial planet formation…
The study of the planet-debris disk connection can shed light on the formation and evolution of planetary systems, and may help predict the presence of planets around stars with certain disk characteristics. In preliminary analyses of the…
During the final stage of planetary formation, different formation pathways of planetary embryos could significantly influence the observed variations in planetary densities. Of the approximately 5,000 exoplanets identified to date, a…
Impactors of different types and sizes can produce a final crater of the same diameter on a planet under certain conditions. We derive the condition for such "isocrater impacts" from scaling laws, as well as relations that describe how the…
M dwarfs are prime targets in the hunt for habitable worlds around other stars. This is due to their abundance as well as their small radii and low masses and temperatures, which facilitate the detection of temperate, rocky planets in orbit…
We present an improved estimate of the occurrence rate of small planets orbiting small stars by searching the full four-year Kepler data set for transiting planets using our own planet detection pipeline and conducting transit injection and…
In general relativity, the Mercury's orbit becomes approximately elliptical and the its perihelion has thus an additional advance. We demonstrate, meanwhile, that in comparison of those given by the Newton's theory of gravitation for the…
We have evaluated the rate at which the asteroid belt is losing material, and how it splits between macroscopic bodies and meteoritic dust. The mass loss process is due to the injection of asteroid fragments into unstable dynamical regions,…
In circumstellar discs, collisional grinding of planetesimals produces second-generation dust. While it remains unclear whether this ever becomes a major component of the total dust content, the presence of such dust, and potentially the…