Related papers: Outcomes of Planetary Collisions: Importance of Gr…
The final stage in the formation of terrestrial planets consists of the accumulation of ~1000-km ``planetary embryos'' and a swarm of billions of 1-10 km ``planetesimals.'' During this process, water-rich material is accreted by the…
In the standard scenario of planet formation, terrestrial planets, ice giants, and cores of gas giants are formed by the accumulation of planetesimals. However, there are few N-body simulation studies of planetesimal accretion that…
We simulate the hypothesised collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized impactor that created the Moon. Amongst the resulting debris disk in some impacts, we find a self-gravitating clump of material. It is roughly the mass of the…
We present preliminary results of terrestrial planet formation using on the one hand classical numerical integration of hundreds of small bodies on CPUs and on the other hand -- for comparison reasons -- the results of our GPU code with…
Exomoons orbiting terrestrial or super-terrestrial exoplanets have not yet been discovered; their possible existence and properties are therefore still an unresolved question. Here we explore the collisional formation of exomoons through…
Our knowledge of the strengths of small bodies in the Solar System is limited by our poor understanding of their internal structures, and this, in turn, clouds our understanding of the formation and evolution of these bodies. Observations…
The problem of the formation of the Moon is still not explained satisfactorily. While it is a generally accepted scenario that the last giant impact on Earth between some 50 to 100 million years after the starting of the formation of the…
Three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations are presented for the direct head-on or off-center collision of two neutron stars, employing a basically Newtonian PPM code but including the emission of gravitational waves and their…
Planets grow via the collisional accretion of small bodies in a protoplanetary disk. Such small bodies feel strong gas drag and their orbits are significantly affected by the gas flow and atmospheric structure around the planet. We…
In this paper, we present results from a multi-stage numerical campaign to begin to explain and determine why extreme debris disk detections are rare, what types of impacts will result in extreme debris disks and what we can learn about the…
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…
The origin of Mercury still remains poorly understood compared to the other rocky planets of the Solar System. One of the most relevant constraints that any formation model has to fulfill refers to its internal structure, with a predominant…
Embryos of the Moon and the Earth may have formed as a result of contraction of a common parental rarefied condensation. The required angular momentum of this condensation could largely be acquired in a collision of two rarefied…
The paper discusses a model of the bombardment of the Earth and the Moon by small bodies when these planets were formed. It is shown that the total ice mass delivered with the bodies to the Earth from the feeding zone of the giant planets…
We aim to create deterministic collisions between orbiting bodies by applying a time-dependent external force to one or both bodies, whether the bodies are mutually repulsive, as in the two- or multi-electron atomic case or mutually…
The final "giant-impact" phase of terrestrial planet formation is believed to begin with a large number of planetary "embryos" on nearly circular, coplanar orbits. Mutual gravitational interactions gradually excite their eccentricities…
We present the results of planet formation N-body simulations based on a comprehensive physical model that includes planetary mass growth through mutual embryo collisions and planetesimal/boulder accretion, viscous disc evolution, planetary…
Mercury is notoriously difficult to form in solar system simulations, due to its small mass and iron-rich composition. Smooth particle hydrodynamics simulations of collisions have found that a Mercury-like body could be formed by one or…
For problems in astrophysics, planetary science and beyond, numerical simulations are often limited to simulating fewer particles than in the real system. To model collisions, the simulated particles (aka superparticles) need to be inflated…
Considering the huge computational resources required by smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations and the overestimation of post-collision materials from perfect merging, we develop a statistical method to deal with collisions…