Related papers: Spall Craters in the Solar System
We investigate the scattering of strahl electrons by microinstabilities as a mechanism for creating the electron halo in the solar wind. We develop a mathematical framework for the description of electron-driven microinstabilities and…
Crater count equilibrium occurs when new craters form at the same rate that old craters are erased, such that the total number of observable impacts remains constant. Despite substantial efforts to understand this process, there remain many…
Saturn's rings consist of a huge number of water ice particles, with a tiny addition of rocky material. They form a flat disk, as the result of an interplay of angular momentum conservation and the steady loss of energy in dissipative…
Pluto's terrains display a diversity of crater retention ages ranging from areas with no identifiable craters to heavily cratered terrains. This variation in crater densities is consistent with geologic activity occurring throughout Pluto's…
Satellites around large asteroids are preferentially found among those with the most rapid rotation and elongated shape. The taxonomic statistics are similarly skewed; in total, 13 asteroids larger than 100 km are known to have satellites,…
Seismic attenuation in granular porous media is of paramount importance in rock physics and seismology. Unlike sandstones, shales are mixtures of sand grains and clays with extremely low porosity and permeability. Swelling of clays upon…
Although general relativity passes all precision tests to date, there are several reasons to go beyond the current model of gravitation and search for new fundamental physics. This means looking for new, so far undetected, fields. Scalars…
According to Shoemaker, the "impact of solid bodies is the most fundamental process that has taken place on the terrestrial planets", as they shape the surfaces of all solar system bodies. A lot of information on this process has been…
The aim of this review article is to give a comprehensive description of the scaling properties detected for the distribution of cosmic structures. Due to the great variety of statistical methods to describe the large-scale structure of the…
The growth of a planetary core by pebble accretion stops at the so called pebble isolation mass, when the core generates a pressure bump that traps drifting pebbles outside its orbit. If the isolation mass is very small, then gas accretion…
We study the orbital architecture of multi-planet systems detected by the Kepler transit mission using N-body simulations, focusing on the orbital spacing between adjacent planets in systems showing four or more transiting planets. We find…
This work aims at exploring the scaling relations among rocky exoplanets. With the assumption of internal gravity increasing linearly in the core, and staying constant in the mantle, and tested against numerical simulations, a simple model…
Small scale jet-induced erosion experiments are useful for identifying the scaling of erosion with respect to the various physical parameters (gravity, grain size, gas velocity, gas density, grain density, etc.), and because they provide a…
We present a series of numerical simulations using a shock physics smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code, investigating energetic impacts on small celestial bodies characterised by diverse internal structures, ranging from weak and…
Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their…
Growing planets interact with their surrounding protoplanetary disk, generating feedback effects that may promote or suppress nearby planet formation. We study how spiral waves launched by planets affect the motion and collisional evolution…
Pit craters are circular to subcircular depressions that lack a rim and ejecta layer and typically have a conical shape. There are several mechanisms that can explain the formation of such depressions and they are associated with collapse…
This is a study of the history of the asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Collisions have been the dominant process. Every asteroid has been impacted by others a multitude of times, with consequences of cratering, erosion, spin increments,…
Scalarization is a mechanism that endows strongly self-gravitating bodies, such as neutron stars and black holes, with a scalar-field configuration. It resembles a phase transition in that the scalar configuration appears only when a…
Investigating in the laboratory the process of matter accretion onto forming stars through scaled experiments is important in order to better understand star and planetary systems formation and evolution. Such experiments can indeed…