Related papers: The atmospheric entry of cometary impactors
Impacts by rocky and icy bodies are thought to have played a key role in shaping the composition of solar system objects, including the Earth's habitability. Hence, it is likely that they play a similar role in exoplanetary systems. We…
Impacts from icy and rocky bodies have helped shape the composition of solar system objects, for example the Earth-Moon system, or the recent impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter. It is likely that such impacts also shape the…
The orbital regime of a terrestrial planet plays a significant role in shaping its atmospheric dynamics, climate, and hence potential habitability. The orbit is also likely to play a role in shaping the response of a planetary atmosphere to…
In this work we consider the potential of cometary impacts to deliver complex organic molecules and the prebiotic building blocks required for life to rocky exoplanets. Numerical experiments have demonstrated that for these molecules to…
Planets that form early enough to be embedded in the circumstellar gas disk accumulate thick atmospheres of nebular gas. Models of these atmospheres need to specify the surface luminosity (i.e. energy loss rate) of the planet. This…
Micrometeoroids (cosmic dust with size between a few $\mu$m and $\sim$1 mm) dominate the annual extraterrestrial mass flux to the Earth. We investigate the range of physical processes occurring when micrometeoroids traverse the atmosphere.…
The primary epoch of planetary accretion concludes with giant impacts - highly energetic collisions between proto-planets that can play a key role in shaping a planet's inventory of volatile elements. Previous work has shown that single…
The scattering of small bodies by planets is an important dynamical process in planetary systems. We present an analytical model to describe this process using the simplifying assumption that each particle's dynamics is dominated by a…
We present a new scaling law to predict the loss of atmosphere from planetary collisions for any speed, angle, impactor mass, target mass, and body compositions, in the regime of giant impacts onto broadly terrestrial planets with…
Atmospheric mass loss is a fundamental phenomenon shaping the structure and evolution of planetary atmospheres. It can engage processes ranging from global interactions with the host star and large-scale hydrodynamic outflows to essentially…
The chemical environments of young planets are assumed to be largely influenced by impacts of bodies lingering on unstable trajectories after the dissolution of the protoplanetary disk. We explore the chemical consequences of impacts within…
In this work we explore a new dynamical path for the delivery of low-inclination comets. In a configuration formed by an interior giant planet and an exterior massive debris disk, where the mass is accounted for by the 50 largest objects in…
Comets hold the key to the understanding of our solar system, its formation and its evolution, and to the fundamental plasma processes at work both in it and beyond it. A comet nucleus emits gas as it is heated by the sunlight. The gas…
The TRAPPIST-1 system is unique in that it has a chain of seven terrestrial Earth-like planets located close to or in its habitable zone. In this paper, we study the effect of potential cometary impacts on the TRAPPIST-1 planets and how…
In an Earth-analogue atmosphere, water vapour is a key carrier of hydrogen in the lower atmosphere with its transport above the tropopause controlling the atmospheric hydrogen escape rate. On the Earth, this escape is limited by transport…
In the standard model for giant planet formation, the planetary growth begins with accretion of solids followed by a buildup of a gaseous atmosphere as more solids are accreted, and finally, by rapid accretion of gas. The interaction of the…
The evolution of exoplanetary atmospheres is strongly influenced by atmospheric escape, particularly for close-in planets. Fractionation during atmospheric loss can preferentially remove lighter elements such as hydrogen, while retaining…
All cometary nuclei that formed in the early Solar System incorporated radionuclides and therefore were subject to internal radiogenic heating. Previous work predicts that if comets have a pebble-pile structure internal temperature build-up…
Earth likely acquired much of its inventory of volatile elements during the main stage of its formation. Some of Earth's proto-atmosphere must therefore have survived the giant impacts, collisions between planet-sized bodies, that dominate…
The discovery of the first two interstellar objects implies that, on average, every star contributes a substantial amount of material to the galactic population by ejecting such bodies from the host system. Since scattering is a chaotic…