Related papers: The Asteroid-Comet Continuum
Comets hold the key to the understanding of our solar system, its formation and its evolution, and to the fundamental plasma processes at work both in it and beyond it. A comet nucleus emits gas as it is heated by the sunlight. The gas…
Most comets are volatile-rich bodies that have recently entered the inner solar system following long-term storage in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud reservoirs. These reservoirs feed several distinct, short-lived "small body"…
The Centaurs are a population of small, planet-crossing objects in the outer solar system. They are dynamically short-lived and represent the transition population between the Kuiper belt and the Jupiter family short-period comets.…
Comets have been invoked in numerous studies as a potentially important source of dust and gas around stars, but none has studied the thermo-physical evolution, out-gassing rate, and dust ejection of these objects in such stellar systems.…
A detailed study of comets active at large heliocentric distances (greater than 4 au) which enter the Solar System for the first time and are composed of matter in its elementary, unprocessed state, would help in our understanding of the…
The great diversity of extrasolar planetary systems has challenged our understanding of how planets form, and how their orbits evolve as they form. Among the various processes that may account for this diversity, the gravitational…
The number of stars that are known to have debris disks is greater than that of stars known to harbour planets. These disks are detected because dust is created in the destruction of planetesimals in the disks much in the same way that dust…
The most pristine remnants of the Solar system's planet formation epoch orbit the Sun beyond Neptune, the small bodies of the trans-Neptunian object populations. The bulk of the mass is in ~100 km objects, but objects at smaller sizes have…
Evidence for exocomets, icy bodies in extrasolar planetary systems, has rapidly increased over the past decade. Volatiles are detected through the gas that exocomets release as they collide and grind down within their natal belts, or as…
Drain away the earth's oceans and a global pattern of great ridges appears. Adjacent to these continental and undersea mountain ranges are layers of silt and clay, so thick that they fill the gaps between ridges, creating extensive…
A question central to understanding the origin of our solar system is: how do planets form in circumstellar disks around young stars? Because of the complex nature of the physical processes involved, multi-wavelength observations of large…
Core Accretion, the most widely accepted scenario for planet formation, postulates existence of km-sized solid bodies, called planetesimals, arranged in a razor-thin disc in the earliest phases of planet formation. In the Tidal Downsizing…
A review of the results on the migration of celestial bodies in the Solar System and in some exoplanetary systems is presented. Some problems of planet accumulation and migration of planetesimals, small bodies and dust in the forming and…
This paper reviews our current understanding of terrestrial planets formation. The focus is on computer simulations of the dynamical aspects of the accretion process. Throughout the chapter, we combine the results of these theoretical…
Asteroid impacts with the Earth may have played an essential role in the emergence of life on Earth through their creation of favorable niches for life, changes to the atmosphere and delivery of water. Consequently, we suggest two potential…
Meteorites are a remarkable resource. They capture the imagination of people worldwide with their spectacular entry through Earth's atmosphere as fireballs, and their exotic character of being pieces of other worlds. Scientifically, they…
A series of astronomical observations obtained over the period 1986 to 2018 supports the idea that life is a cosmic rather than a purely terrestrial or planetary phenomenon. These include (1) the detection of biologically relevant molecules…
The nucleosynthetic heterogeneity between different asteroids and planets is well established. These isotopic variations manifest themselves at the part per millions level or larger, in isotopes that were synthesised in various stellar…
Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…
The orbital evolution and stability of planetary systems with interaction from the belts is studied using the standard phase-plane analysis. In addition to the fixed point which corresponds to the Keplerian orbit, there are other fixed…