Related papers: Asteroids fail to retain cometary impact signature…
The overall shape, internal structure and surface morphology of small bodies such as asteroids and comets are determined to a large degree by the last global-scale impact or disruption event. Depending on the specific energy, impacts lead…
Immediately after their formation, the terrestrial planets experienced intense impact bombardment by comets, leftover planetesimals from primary accretion, and asteroids. This temporal interval in solar system evolution, termed late…
Many asteroids are rubble piles with irregular shapes. While the irregular shapes of large asteroids may be attributed to collisional events, those of small asteroids may result from not only impact events but also rotationally induced…
Recent advances in astronomical instrumentation mean that we are now able to image the thermal emission from the disks of dust around main sequence stars that may be the fossil remnants of planetary formation. These observations imply that…
Main sequence stars are commonly surrounded by debris disks, composed of cold dust continuously replenished by a reservoir of undetected dust-producing planetesimals. In a planetary system with a belt of planetesimals (like the Solar…
Here we report on the significant role of a so far overlooked dynamical aspect, namely a secular resonance between the dwarf planet Ceres and other asteroids. We demonstrate that this type of secular resonance can be the dominant dynamical…
Models of terrestrial planet formation predict that the final stages of planetary assembly, lasting tens of millions of years beyond the dispersal of young protoplanetary disks, are dominated by planetary collisions. It is through these…
Planet perturbations are often invoked as a potential explanation for many spatial structures that have been imaged in debris discs. So far this issue has been mostly investigated with collisionless N-body numerical models. We numerically…
Giant impacts were common in the early evolution of the Solar System, and it is possible that Venus also experienced an impact. A giant impact on Venus could have affected its rotation rate and possibly its thermal evolution. In this work,…
The last three decades the asteroid (1) Ceres is an object of the intensive ground-and space-based observations. A new unusual contributing to these studies represents the recent detection of localized sources of water vapour releasing from…
Orbital resonances are believed to be responsible for the delivery of main belt asteroids to the inner Solar System. Several possibilities have been suggested to transport asteroids and their fragments into mean motion and secular…
Not only do the sampled terrestrial worlds (Earth, Mars, and asteroid 4 Vesta) differ in their mass-independent (nucleosynthetic) isotopic compositions of many elements (e.g. $\varepsilon^{48}$Ca, $\varepsilon^{50}$Ti, $\varepsilon^{54}$Cr,…
Asteroid activity (e.g., thermo-mechanical breakdown, impacts, rotational shedding, tidal disruption, etc.) can inject meteoroids into near-Earth space and leave detectable signatures in orbit catalogs. We searched for such recent…
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…
A large fraction of stars are formed in dense clusters. In the cluster, close encounters between stars at distances less than 100 au are common. It has been shown that during close encounters planets can transfer between stars. Such…
In the last decade, thanks to the development of sophisticated numerical codes, major breakthroughs have been achieved in our understanding of the formation of asteroid families by catastrophic disruption of large parent bodies. In this…
Advances in the discovery and characterization of asteroids over the past decade have revealed an unanticipated underlying structure that points to a dramatic early history of the inner Solar System. The asteroids in the main asteroid belt…
Cometary outbursts offer a valuable window into the composition of comet nuclei with their forceful ejection of dust and volatiles in explosive events, revealing the interior components of the comet. Understanding how different types of…
The survival of asteroid Vesta during the violent early history of the Solar System is a pivotal constraint on theories of planetary formation. Particularly important from this perspective is the amount of olivine excavated from the vestan…
The asteroid belt is characterized by an extreme low total mass of material on dynamically excited orbits. The Nice Model explains many peculiar qualities of the solar system, including the belt's excited state, by invoking an orbital…