Related papers: Explaining Mercury via a single giant impact is hi…
The formation of the solar system's giant planets predated the ultimate epoch of massive impacts that concluded the process of terrestrial planet formation. Following their formation, the giant planets' orbits evolved through an episode of…
Three major planets, Venus, Earth, and Mercury formed out of the solar nebula. A fourth planetesimal, Theia, also formed near Earth where it collided in a giant impact, rebounding as the planet Mars. During this impact Earth lost…
In the canonical model of Moon formation, a Mars-sized protoplanet "Theia" collides with proto-Earth at close to their mutual escape velocity $v_{\rm esc}$ and a common impact angle 45{\deg}. The "graze-and-merge" collision strands a…
Migration of planetesimals from the feeding zone of the terrestrial planets, which was divided into seven regions depending on the distance to the Sun, was simulated. The influence of gravity of all planets was taken into account. In some…
Recent observations of rocky super-Earths have revealed an apparent wider distribution of Fe/Mg ratios, or core to mantle ratios, than the planets in our Solar System. This study aims to understand how much of the chemical diversity in the…
Evidence of mutually inclined planetary orbits has been reported for giant planets these last years. Here we aim to study the impact of eccentric and inclined massive giant planets on the terrestrial planet formation process, and…
The pathway to forming the iron-rich planet Mercury remains mysterious. Mercury's core makes up 70% of the planetary mass, which implies a significant enrichment of iron relative to silicates, while its mantle is strongly depleted in…
This work describes new dynamical simulations of terrestrial planet formation. The simulations started at the protoplanetary disk stage, when planetesimals formed and accreted into protoplanets, and continued past the late stage of giant…
The MESSENGER mission sought to discover what physical processes determined Mercury's high metal to silicate ratio. Instead, the mission has discovered multiple anomalous characteristics about our innermost planet. The lack of FeO and the…
With approximately one ninth of Earth's mass, Mars is widely considered to be a stranded planetary embryo that never became a fully-grown planet. A currently popular planet formation theory predicts that Mars formed near Earth and Venus and…
The origins of Uranus and Neptune are not fully understood. Their inclined rotation axes -- obliquities -- suggest that they experienced giant impacts during their formation histories. Simulations modeling their accretion from giant impacts…
Major element fractionation among chondrites has been discussed for decades as ratios relative to Si or Mg. Recently, by expressing ratios relative to Fe, I discovered a new relationship admitting the possibility that ordinary chondrite…
In the standard model of terrestrial planet formation, planets are formed through giant impacts of planetary embryos after the dispersal of the protoplanetary gas disc. Traditionally, $N$-body simulations have been used to investigate this…
Giant impacts dominate the final stages of terrestrial planet formation and set the configuration and compositions of the final system of planets. A giant impact is believed to be responsible for the formation of Earth's Moon, but the…
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…
Massive cores of the giant planets are thought to have formed in a gas disk by accretion of pebble-size particles whose accretional cross-section is enhanced by aerodynamic gas drag [1][2]. A commonly held view is that the terrestrial…
The last phase of the formation of rocky planets is dominated by collisions among Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos. Simulations of this phase need to handle the difficulty of including the post-impact material without saturating the…
A successful solar system model must reproduce the four terrestrial planets. Here, we focus on 1) the likelihood of forming Mercury and the four terrestrial planets in the same system (a 4-P system); 2) the orbital properties and masses of…
We review the problem of the formation of terrestrial planets, with particular emphasis on the interaction of dynamical and geochemical models. The lifetime of gas around stars in the process of formation is limited to a few million years…
The final stage of terrestrial planet formation is known as the giant impact stage where protoplanets collide with one another to form planets. So far this stage has been mainly investigated by N-body simulations with an assumption of…