Related papers: Size-Frequency Distribution of Terrestrial Leftove…
It has been long proposed that, if all the terrestrial planets form within a tiny ring of solid material at around 1 AU, the concentrated mass-distance distribution of the current system can be reproduced. Recent planetesimal formation…
Although petrologic, chemical and isotopic studies of ordinary chondrites and meteorites in general have largely helped establish a chronology of the earliest events of planetesimal formation and their evolution, there are several questions…
Building the terrestrial planets has been a challenge for planet formation models. In particular, classical theories have been unable to reproduce the small mass of Mars and instead predict that a planet near 1.5 AU should roughly be 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 combine several constraints provided by the crater records on Arrokoth and the worlds of the Pluto system to compute the size-frequency distribution (SFD) of the crater production function for craters with diameter D<10km. For this…
The NASA Dawn mission has extensively examined the surface of asteroid Vesta, the second most massive body in the main belt. The high quality of the gathered data provides us with an unique opportunity to determine the surface and internal…
A considerable amount of information regarding the processes that occurred during the accretion of the early planetesimals is still present among the small bodies of our solar system. A review of our current knowledge of the density of…
The locations of the fully despun, double synchronous end states of tidal evolution are derived for spherical components. With the exception of nearly equal-mass binaries, binary asteroid systems are in the midst of lengthy tidal…
We study the efficiency of forming large bodies, starting from a sea of equal-sized planetesimals. This is likely one of the earlier steps of planet formation and relevant for the formation of the asteroid belt, the Kuiper belt and…
We performed a wide-field survey observation of small asteroids using the Hyper Suprime-Cam installed on the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope. We detected more than 3,000 main-belt asteroids with a detection limit of 24.2 mag in the r-band, which…
Metal-rich asteroids and iron meteorites are considered core remnants of differentiated planetesimals and or products of oxygen-depleted accretion. Investigating the origins of iron-rich planetesimals could provide key insights into planet…
We present results from a suite of N-body simulations that follow the accretion history of the terrestrial planets using a new parallel treecode that we have developed. We initially place 2000 equal size planetesimals between 0.5--4.0 AU…
The growth time scales of planetary embryos and their formation process are imperative for our understanding on how planetary systems form and develop. They determine the subsequent growth mechanisms during the life stages of a…
The population of natural objects in a 1:1 mean motion resonance with Earth are known as Earth's co-orbitals. Main belt objects can dynamically evolve into Earth co-orbitals but taxonomic studies of some of them have suggested that they are…
Standard models of planet formation explain how planets form in axisymmetric, unperturbed disks in single star systems. However, it is possible that giant planets could have already formed when other planetary embryos start to grow. We…
The Asteroid Belt is characterized by the radial mixing of bodies with different physical properties, a very low mass compared to Minimum Mass Solar Nebula expectations and has an excited orbital distribution. Models of the evolution of the…
The terrestrial planets formed by accretion of asteroid-like objects within the inner solar system's protoplanetary disk. Previous works have found that forming a small-mass Mars requires the disk to contain little mass beyond ~1.5 au…
The size distribution of small asteroids in the Main Belt is assumed to be determined by an equilibrium between the creation of new bodies out of the impact debris of larger asteroids and the destruction of small asteroids by collisions…
The population of Earth-impacting meteoroids and its size-dependent orbital elements are key to understanding the origin of meteorites and informing on planetary defence efforts. Outstanding questions include the role of collisions in…
More than a half of asteroids in the main belt have irregular shapes with the ratios of the minor to major axis lengths less than 0.6. One of the mechanisms to create such shapes is collisions between asteroids. The relationship between…