Related papers: Asteroids fail to retain cometary impact signature…
In the Nice model, the late heavy bombardment (LHB) is related to an orbital instability of giant planets which causes a fast dynamical dispersion of a transneptunian cometary disk. We study effects produced by these hypothetical cometary…
The dynamical architecture and compositional diversity of the asteroid belt strongly constrain planet formation models. Recent Solar System formation models have shown that the asteroid belt may have been born empty and later filled with…
Understanding the origin of bright shooting stars and their meteorite samples is among the most ancient astronomy-related questions that at larger scales has human consequences [1-3]. As of today, only ${\sim}\,6\%$ of meteorite falls have…
The cumulative effects of weak resonant and secular perturbations by the major planets produce chaotic behavior of asteroids on long timescales. Dynamical chaos is the dominant loss mechanism for asteroids with diameters D > 10 km in the…
Differentiated asteroids are rare in the main asteroid belt despite evidence for ~100 distinct differentiated bodies in the meteorite record. We have sought to understand why so few main-belt asteroids differentiated and where those…
The detection of olivine on Vesta is interesting because it may provide critical insights into planetary differentiation early in our Solar System's history. Ground-based and Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of asteroid (4) Vesta…
For decades the limited thickness of Vesta's basaltic crust, revealed by the link between the asteroid and the howardite-eucrite-diogenite family of meteorites, and its survival to collisional erosion offered an important constraint for the…
Although current sensitivity limits are such that true Solar System analogs remain challenging to detect, numerous planetary systems have been discovered that are very different from our own Solar System. The majority of systems harbor a…
Improving constraints on the abundance of basaltic asteroids in the main asteroid belt is necessary for better understanding the thermal and collisional environment in the early solar system, for more rigorously identifying the genetic…
Small bodies in the solar system are conventionally classified into asteroids and comets. However, it is recently found that a small number of objects can exhibit properties of both asteroids and comets. Some are more consistent with…
The asteroid belt is the leftover of the original planetesimal population in the inner solar system. However, currently the asteroids have orbits with all possible values of eccentricities and inclinations compatible with long-term…
The asteroids are primitive solar system bodies which evolve both collisionally and through disruptions due to rapid rotation [1]. These processes can lead to the formation of binary asteroids [2-4] and to the release of dust [5], both…
The past decade has brought major improvements in large-scale asteroid discovery and characterization with over half a million known asteroids and over 100,000 with some measurement of physical characterization. This explosion of data has…
Collisions are one of the key processes shaping planetary systems. Asteroid families are outcomes of such collisions still identifiable across our solar system. The families provide a unique view of catastrophic disruption phenomena and…
Ceres is the largest and most massive body in the asteroid main belt. Observational data from the Dawn spacecraft reveal the presence of at least two impact craters about 280~km in diameter on the Ceres surface, that could have expelled a…
NASA's Dawn spacecraft observations of asteroid (4) Vesta reveal a surface with the highest albedo and color variation of any asteroid we have observed so far. Terrains rich in low albedo dark material (DM) have been identified using Dawn…
Context. The dwarf planet Ceres and the asteroid Vesta have been studied by the Dawn space mission. They are the two heaviest bodies of the main asteroid belt and have different characteristics. Notably, Vesta appears to be dry and inactive…
[abridged] In the typical giant-impact scenario for the Moon formation most of the Moon's material originates from the impactor. Any Earth-impactor composition difference should, therefore, correspond to a comparable Earth-Moon composition…
Some fast radio bursts (FRBs) exhibit repetitive behaviors and their origins remain enigmatic. It has been argued that repeating FRBs could be produced by the interaction between a neutron star and an asteroid belt. Here we consider the…
Asteroid (596) Scheila was the first object for which the immediate aftermath of an inter-asteroidal collision was observed. In Dec. 2010, the 113 km-sized asteroid was impacted by a smaller asteroid of less than 100 m in diameter. The…