Related papers: Dynamical origin of the Dwarf Planet Ceres
The cumulative effects of weak resonant and secular perturbations by the major planets produce chaotic behavior of asteroids on long timescales. Dynamical chaos is the dominant loss mechanism for asteroids with diameters D > 10 km in the…
Metal-rich asteroids and iron meteorites are considered core remnants of differentiated planetesimals and or products of oxygen-depleted accretion. Investigating the origins of iron-rich planetesimals could provide key insights into planet…
Using a fully autonomous spacecraft - Bering - we propose to detect and study sub-km asteroids from an orbit within the asteroid Main Belt. The main purpose of the proposed Bering mission is to detect a statistically significant sample of…
Suggestions have been made that asteroid belts may be important both for the existence of life and perhaps even for the evolution of complex life on a planet. Using numerical models for protoplanetary discs we calculate the location of the…
Polluted white dwarfs are generally accreting terrestrial-like material that may originate from a debris belt like the asteroid belt in the solar system. The fraction of white dwarfs that are polluted drops off significantly for white…
Dynamical instabilities among giant planets are thought to be nearly ubiquitous, and culminate in the ejection of one or more planets into interstellar space. Here we perform N-body simulations of dynamical instabilities while accounting…
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;…
Modern terrestrial planet formation models are highly successful at consistently generating planets with masses and orbits analogous to those of Earth and Venus. In stark contrast to classic theoretical predictions and inferred demographics…
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…
The discovery of 2012VP113 initiated the debate on the origin of the Sedna family of planetesimals in orbit around the Sun. Sednitos roam the outer regions of the Solar System between the Egeworth--Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, in…
Gas giant planets have been detected on eccentric orbits several hundreds of astronomical units in size around other stars. It has been proposed that even the Sun hosts a wide-orbit planet of 5-10 Earth masses, often called Planet Nine,…
N-body numerical simulations code for the orbital motion of asteroids/planetesimals within the asteroid belt under the gravitational influence of the sun and the accreting planets has been developed. The aim is to make qualitative, and to…
It has been long proposed that, if all the terrestrial planets form within a tiny ring of solid material at around 1 AU, the concentrated mass-distance distribution of the current system can be reproduced. Recent planetesimal formation…
We discuss problems of planetesimal migration in the emerging Solar System and exoplanetary systems. Protoplanetary disk evolution models and the formation of planets are considered. The formation of the Moon and of the asteroid and…
Exoplanets display incredible diversity, from planetary system architectures around Sun-like stars that are very different to our Solar System, to planets orbiting post-main sequence stars or stellar remnants. Recently the B-star Exoplanet…
It is likely that multiple bodies with masses between those of Mars and Earth ("planetary embryos") formed in the outer planetesimal disk of the solar system. Some of these were likely scattered by the giant planets into orbits with…
We use published models of the early Solar System evolution with a slow, long-range and grainy migration of Neptune to predict the orbital element distributions and the number of modern-day Centaurs. The model distributions are biased by…
We use the clathrate hydrate trapping theory (Lunine & Stevenson 1985) and the gas drag formalism of Weidenschilling (1977) to calculate the composition of ices incorporated in the interior of Ceres. In the spirit of the work of Cyr et al.…
The Centaurs are recent escapees from the Kuiper belt that are destined either to meet fiery oblivion in the hot inner regions of the Solar system or to be ejected to the interstellar medium by gravitational scattering from the giant…
Very red featureless asteroids (spectroscopic D-types) are expected to have formed in the outer solar system far from the sun. They comprise the majority of asteroids in the Jupiter Trojan population, and are also commonly found in the…