Related papers: Asteroids fail to retain cometary impact signature…
An abundance decrease in carbon- and oxygen-bearing species relative to dust has been frequently found in planet-forming disks, which can be attributed to an overall reduction of gas mass. However, in the case of TW Hya, the only disk with…
The near-Earth asteroid population suggests the existence of an inner Main Belt source of asteroids that belongs to the spectroscopic X-complex and has moderate albedos. The identification of such a source has been lacking so far. We argue…
Intense bombardment of solar system planets in the immediate aftermath of protoplanetary disk dissipation has played a key role in their atmospheric evolution. During this epoch, energetic collisions will have removed significant masses of…
The observational evidence that planetary systems can be very different from each other, suggests that their dynamical histories were very diverse, probably as a result of a strong sensitivity to the initial conditions. Severe dynamical…
The solar system's Oort cloud can be perturbed by the Galactic tide and by individual passing stars. These perturbations can inject Oort cloud objects into the inner parts of the solar system, where they may be observed as the long-period…
There is a great deal of scientific interest in characterizing the basaltic asteroids (spectrally classified as V-types), as they are the key to understanding planetesimal formation and evolution in the early Solar System. These have long…
The distribution of asteroids across the Main Belt has been studied for decades to understand the compositional distribution and what that tells us about the formation and evolution of our solar system. All-sky surveys now provide orders of…
Numerical modeling has long suggested that gravitationally-bound (or so-called rubble-pile) near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) can be destroyed by tidal forces during close and slow encounters with terrestrial planets. However, tidal disruptions…
Asteroids and comets dissipate energy when they rotate about the axis different from the axis of the maximal moment of inertia. We show that the most efficient internal relaxation happens at the double frequency of body's tumbling.…
We consider how an impact generated seismic pulse affects the surface of an asteroid distant from the impact site. With laboratory experiments on dry polydisperse gravel mixtures, we track the trajectories of particles ejected from the…
It is widely accepted that Titan and the mid-sized regular satellites around Saturn were formed in the circum-Saturn disk. Thus, if these mid-sized satellites were simply accreted by collisions of similar ice-rock satellitesimals in the…
The tidal disruption of a solar mass star around a supermassive black hole has been extensively studied analytically and numerically. In these events the star develops into an elongated banana-shaped structure. After completing an eccentric…
Main Belt comets represent a recently discovered class of objects. They are quite intriguing because, while having a Tisserand invariant value higher than 3, are showing cometary activity. We study the activity of the Main Belt comets…
The mass density of dust particles that form from asteroids and comets in the interplanetary medium of the solar system is, near 1 AU, comparable to the mass density of the solar wind. It is mainly contained in particles of micrometer size…
This is an overview of recent research on meteors and the parent bodies from which they are produced. While many meteor showers result from material ejected by comets, two out of the three strongest annual showers (the Geminids and the…
The solar system is dusty, and would become dustier over time as asteroids collide and comets disintegrate, except that small debris particles in interplanetary space do not last long. They can be ejected from the solar system by Jupiter,…
The Sun and >15 percent of nearby stars are surrounded by dusty debris disks that must be collisionally replenished by asteroids and comets, as the dust would otherwise be depleted on <10 Myr timescales (ref. 1). Theoretical studies show…
Stellar flybys in star clusters are suspected to affect the orbital architecture of planetary systems causing eccentricity excitation and orbital misalignment between the planet orbit and the equatorial plane of the star. We explore whether…
We use the current orbital structure of large (>50km) asteroids in the main asteroid belt to constrain the evolution of the giant planets when they migrated from their primordial orbits to their current ones. Minton & Malhotra (2009) showed…
Impactors of different types and sizes can produce a final crater of the same diameter on a planet under certain conditions. We derive the condition for such "isocrater impacts" from scaling laws, as well as relations that describe how the…