Related papers: Origin and evolution of Mercury's circumsolar dust…

Theories of the formation and early evolution of planetary systems postulate that planets are born in circumstellar disks, and undergo radial migration during and after dissipation of the dust and gas disk from which they formed. The…

We investigate via numerical modeling the effects of two planets locked in resonance, and migrating outward, on the dust distribution of the natal circumstellar disk. We aim to test whether the dust distribution exhibits peculiar features…

Although discs of dust and gas have been observed orbiting white dwarfs, the origin of this circumstellar matter is uncertain. We hypothesize that the in-situ breakup of small bodies such as asteroids spun to fission during the giant branch…

The inner edge of the dead zone in protoplanetary disks has been shown to periodically go unstable, leading to accretion outbursts and annular substructure within the dead zone. While dust opacities play a key role in this process, the…

New insights into the history of the inner solar system are derived from the impact cratering record of the Moon, Mars, Venus and Mercury, and from the size distributions of asteroid populations. Old craters from a unique period of heavy…

All the four giant planets in our Solar System have rings, but their characteristics are very different. The rings consist of a number of small particles, although individual particles have not been directly imaged. Near the central planet,…

The nearby star Fomalhaut harbours a cold, moderately eccentric dust belt with a sharp inner edge near 133 au. A low-mass, common proper motion companion (Fom b), was discovered near the inner edge and was identified as a planet candidate…

The Sun and >15 percent of nearby stars are surrounded by dusty debris disks that must be collisionally replenished by asteroids and comets, as the dust would otherwise be depleted on <10 Myr timescales (ref. 1). Theoretical studies show…

Many nearby stars are surrounded by a bright ring or disk of cold dust. Our calculations show that these disks and rings of dust are signposts of recent planet formation. Bright rings appear because dust associated with the formation of a…

To contribute to the knowledge of dynamics of interplanetary dust we are searching for structures in the spatial distribution of interplanetary dust near the orbit of Venus. To this end we study the radial gradient of zodiacal light…

The fine dust detected by IR emission around the nearby Beta Pic analogue star HD172555 is very peculiar. The dust mineralogy is composed primarily of highly refractory, non-equilibrium materials, with approximately three-quarters of the Si…

High resolution images of Mercury's surface, from the MESSENGER spacecraft, reveal many bright deposits associated with irregular, shallow, rimless depressions whose origins were attributed to volatile-related activity, but absent…

We investigate the formation and evolution of "primordial" dusty rings occurring in the inner regions of protoplanetary discs, with the help of long-term, coupled dust-gas, magnetohydrodynamic simulations. The simulations are global and…

There have been several model analyses of the near and mid IR flux from the circumstellar ring around HR4796A. In the vicinity of a young star, the possibility that the dust ring is embedded within a residual protostellar gas disk cannot be…

The origin of cosmic dust is a fundamental issue in planetary science. This paper revisits the origin of dust in galaxies, in particular, in the Milky Way, by using a chemical evolution model of a galaxy composed of stars, interstellar…

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…

Circumstellar debris disks are the extrasolar analogues of the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. They consist of comets and leftover planetesimals that continuously collide and produce circumstellar dust that can be observed as infrared…

White dwarfs are routinely observed to have polluted atmospheres, and sometimes significant infrared excesses, that indicate ongoing accretion of circumstellar dust and rocky debris. Typically this debris is assumed to be in the form of a…

The origin of Mars's small moons, Phobos and Deimos, remains unknown. They are typically thought either to be captured asteroids or to have accreted from a debris disk produced by a giant impact. Here, we present an alternative scenario…

We present photometric ISO 60 and 170um measurements, complemented by some IRAS data at 60um, of a sample of 84 nearby main-sequence stars of spectral class A, F, G and K in order to determine the incidence of dust disks around such…