Related papers: Protoplanet Collisions: Statistical Properties of …
Planetary impact events eject large volumes of surface material. Crater excavation processes are difficult to study, and in particular the details of individual ejecta fragments are not well understood. A related, enduring issue in…
The process of gravitational scattering of planetesimals by a massive protoplanetary embryo is explored theoretically. We propose a method to describe the evolution of the disk surface density, eccentricity, and inclination caused by the…
The final stage of terrestrial planet formation consists of the cleanup of residual planetesimals after the giant impact phase. Dynamically, a residual planetesimal population is needed to damp the high eccentricities of the terrestrial…
In spite of substantial advancements in simulating planet formation, the planet Mercury's diminutive mass, isolated orbit, and the absence of planets with shorter orbital periods in the solar system continue to befuddle numerical accretion…
Multiple studies have shown that planet-planet scattering plays an important role in the dynamical evolution of planetary systems. For instance, it has been shown that planet-planet scattering can reproduce the eccentricity distribution of…
We use numerical $N$-body experiments to explore the statistics of multiple systems formed in small-$N$ subclusters, i.e. the distributions of orbital semi-major axis, $a$, orbital eccentricity, $e$, mass ratio, $q$, mutual orbital…
The origin of Mercury still remains poorly understood compared to the other rocky planets of the Solar System. One of the most relevant constraints that any formation model has to fulfill refers to its internal structure, with a predominant…
We perform a suite of smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to investigate in detail the results of a giant impact on the young Uranus. We study the internal structure, rotation rate, and atmospheric retention of the post-impact…
The origin of Uranus and Neptune remains a challenge for planet formation models. A potential explanation is that the planets formed from a population of a few planetary embryos with masses of a few Earth masses which formed beyond Saturn's…
Asteroid pairs had a single progenitor that split due to rotational-fission of a weak, rubble-pile structured body. By constructing shape models of asteroid pairs from multiple-apparition observations and using a lightcurve inversion…
Many exoplanets in close-in orbits are observed to have relatively high eccentricities and large stellar obliquities. We explore the possibility that these result from planet-planet scattering by studying the dynamical outcomes from a large…
Although it is accepted that perfect-merging is not a realistic outcome of collisions, some researchers state that perfect-merging simulations can still be considered as quantitatively reliable representations of the final stage of…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between multiple giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities seem…
Models of terrestrial planet formation for our solar system have been successful in producing planets with masses and orbits similar to those of Venus and Earth. However, these models have generally failed to produce Mars-sized objects…
Planetesimal accretion during planet formation is usually treated as collisionless. Such accretion from a uniform and dynamically cold disk predicts protoplanets with slow retrograde rotation. However, if the building blocks of…
Formation models in which terrestrial bodies grow via the pairwise accretion of planetesimals have been reasonably successful at reproducing the general properties of the solar system, including small body populations. However, planetesimal…
We investigate the orbit-crossing time (T_c) of protoplanet systems both with and without a gas-disk background. The protoplanets are initially with equal masses and separation (EMS systems) scaled by their mutual Hill's radii. In a…
Modelling the formation of super-km-sized planetesimals by gravitational collapse of regions overdense in small particles requires numerical algorithms capable of handling simultaneously hydrodynamics, particle dynamics and particle…
One of the most challenging problems we face in our understanding of planet formation is how Jupiter and Saturn could have formed before the the solar nebula dispersed. The most popular model of giant planet formation is the so-called 'core…
The solar system's dynamical state can be explained by an orbital instability among the giant planets. A recent model has proposed that the giant planet instability happened during terrestrial planet formation. This scenario has been shown…