Related papers: Mercury's formation within the Early Instability S…
The past decade has seen major progress in our understanding of terrestrial planet formation. Yet key questions remain. In this review we first address the growth of 100 km-scale planetesimals as a consequence of dust coagulation and…
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…
Remnant planetesimals might have played an important role in reducing the orbital eccentricities of the terrestrial planets after their formation via giant impacts. However, the population and the size distribution of remnant planetesimals…
Almost all the planets of our solar system have moons. Each planetary system has however unique characteristics. The Martian system has not one single big moon like the Earth, not tens of moons of various sizes like for the giant planets,…
We present numerical simulations of terrestrial planet formation that examine the growth continuously from planetesimals to planets in the inner Solar System. Previous studies show that the growth will be inside-out, but it is still common…
We study the chaotic orbital evolution of planetary systems, focusing on secular (i.e., orbit-averaged) interactions, because these often dominate on long timescales. We first focus on the evolution of a test particle that is forced by…
Our Solar system is almost entirely devoid of material interior to Mercury's orbit, in sharp contrast to the multiple Earth masses of material commonly residing within the analogous region of extrasolar planetary systems. Recent work has…
The Earth, Venus, Mars, and some extrasolar terrestrial planets have a mass and radius that is consistent with a mass fraction of about 30% metallic core and 70% silicate mantle. At the inner frontier of the solar system, Mercury has a…
Our understanding of the process of terrestrial planet formation has grown markedly over the past 20 years, yet key questions remain. This review begins by first addressing the critical, earliest stage of dust coagulation and concentration.…
Mars is likely to be a planetary embryo formed through collisions with planetesimals, which can explain its small mass and rapid formation timescale obtained from 182Hf-182$W chronometry. In the classical theory of planet formation, the…
It has been shown that some aspects of the terrestrial planets can be explained, particularly the Earth/Mars mass ratio, when they form from a truncated disk with an outer edge near 1.0 au (Hansen 2009). This has been previously modeled…
We describe the current state of knowledge about Mercury's interior structure. We review the available observational constraints, including mass, size, density, gravity field, spin state, composition, and tidal response. These data enable…
Containing only a few percent the mass of the moon, the current asteroid belt is around three to four orders of magnitude smaller that its primordial mass inferred from disk models. Yet dynamical studies have shown that the asteroid belt…
The increasing precision of planetary mass and radius observations is bringing major questions about the structure and formation of planets--such as the nature of the radius valley and origin of super-Mercuries--within reach, demanding the…
Terrestrial planets are thought to be the result of a vast number of gravitational interactions and collisions between smaller bodies. We use numerical simulations to show that practically identical initial conditions result in a wide array…
We show that the assembly of the Solar System terrestrial planets can be successfully modelled with all of the mass initially confined to a narrow annulus between 0.7 and 1.0 AU. With this configuration, analogues of Mercury and Mars often…
Mercury's orbit can destabilize, generally resulting in a collision with either Venus or the Sun. Chaotic evolution can cause g1 to decrease to the approximately constant value of g5 and create a resonance. Previous work has approximated…
The dominant accretion process leading to the formation of the terrestrial planets of the Solar System is a subject of intense scientific debate. Two radically different scenarios have been proposed. The classic scenario starts from a disk…
The statistics of extrasolar planetary systems indicate that the default mode of planet formation generates planets with orbital periods shorter than 100 days, and masses substantially exceeding that of the Earth. When viewed in this…
The Jupiter-Saturn chaotic excitation (JSCE) scenario proposes that the protoplanetary disk was dynamically excited and depleted beyond ~1-1.5 au in a few Myr, offering a new and plausible explanation for several observed properties of the…