Related papers: Asteroids fail to retain cometary impact signature…
The discovery of Sedna places new constraints on the origin and evolution of our solar system. Here we investigate the possibility that a close encounter with another star produced the observed edge of the Kuiper belt, at roughly 50 AU, and…
The outcome of collisions between small icy bodies, such as Kuiper belt objects, is poorly understood and yet a critical component of the evolution of the trans-Neptunian region. The expected physical properties of outer solar system…
Space missions like CoRoT, Kepler, and TESS have made asteroseismology a powerful probe of stellar interiors. Red giants are key targets thanks to their rich mixed-mode oscillation spectra, which reveal properties of both core and envelope.…
The main-belt comets occupy dynamically asteroidal orbits in the main asteroid belt. Here we present physical observations of the second-known member of this population, P/2005 U1 (Read), which showed vigorous cometary activity from 2005…
Due to the high-precision nature of the ASTROD (Astrodynamical Space Test of Relativity using Optical Devices) mission concept, the asteroid perturbations on the ASTROD spacecraft is crucial. These perturbations need to be modelled and…
Giant planet migration is an important phenomenon in the evolution of planetary systems. Recent works have shown that giant planet growth and migration can shape the asteroid belt, but these works have not considered interactions between…
We review previously published and newly obtained crater size-frequency distributions in the inner solar system. These data indicate that the Moon and the terrestrial planets have been bombarded by two populations of objects. Population 1,…
We have carried out a search for Main Belt Asteroids (MBAs) co-orbiting with the large MBA Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. Through improving the search criteria used in (Christou, 2000b) and numerical integrations of candidate coorbitals,…
The hypothesis of a recent origin of Saturn's rings and its mid-sized moons is actively debated. It was suggested that a proto-Rhea and a proto-Dione might have collided recently, giving birth to the modern system of mid-sized moons. It is…
In this work, we construct a new model for the collisional evolution of the main asteroid belt. Our goals are to test the scaling law of Benz and Asphaug (1999) and ascertain if it can be used for the whole belt. We want to find initial…
The zodiacal cloud is one of the largest structures in the solar system and strongly governed by meteoroid collisions near the Sun. Collisional erosion occurs throughout the zodiacal cloud, yet it is historically difficult to directly…
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…
Impact basins identified by Mariner 10 and Messenger flyby images provide us a fossilized record of the impactor flux of asteroids on Mercury during the last stages of the early Solar System. The distribution of these basins is not uniform…
The Rosetta mission and its exquisite measurements have revived the debate on whether comets are pristine planetesimals or collisionally evolved objects. We investigate the collisional evolution experienced by the precursors of current…
Galaxy clusters, the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe, are thought to grow by accreting mass from their surroundings through large-scale virial shocks. Due to electron acceleration in such a shock, it should appear as a…
We perform a study on the impacts on Ceres and Vesta. We aim to determine the size-frequency distribution (SFD) of impactors and to identify and quantify the contribution of each source region, as well as the craters produced and fragments…
Asteroid binaries found amongst the Near-Earth objects are believed to have formed from rotational fission. In this paper, we aim to study the dynamical evolution of asteroid systems the moment after fission. The initial condition is…
Splitting of the nuclei of comets into multiple components has been frequently observed but, to date, no main-belt asteroid has been observed to break-up. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, we find that main-belt asteroid P/2013 R3 consists…
The classical theory of differentiation states that due to the heat generated by the decay of radioactive elements, some asteroids form an iron core, an olivine-rich mantle, and a crust. The collisional breakup of these differentiated…
The evolution of the Solar System can be schematically divided into three different phases: the Solar Nebula, the Primordial Solar System and the Modern Solar System. These three periods were characterized by very different conditions, both…