Related papers: Reaccumulation process after a catastrophic disrup…
Large impacts onto young rocky planets may transform their compositions, creating highly reducing conditions at their surfaces and reintroducing highly siderophile metals to their mantles. Key to these processes is the availability of an…
(16) Psyche is the largest M-type asteroid in the main belt and the target of the NASA Discovery-class Psyche mission. Despite gaining considerable interest in the scientific community, Psyche's composition and formation remain…
Asteroids and meteorites provide key evidence on the formation of planetesimals in the Solar System. Asteroids are traditionally thought to form in a bottom-up process by coagulation within a population of initially km-scale planetesimals.…
Our knowledge of the strengths of small bodies in the Solar System is limited by our poor understanding of their internal structures, and this, in turn, clouds our understanding of the formation and evolution of these bodies. Observations…
Asteroid Ryugu and asteroid Bennu, which were recently visited by spacecraft Hayabusa2 and OSIRIS-REx, respectively, are spinning top-shaped rubble piles. Other axisymmetric top-shaped near-Earth asteroids have been observed with…
The origin of Mercury still remains poorly understood compared to the other rocky planets of the Solar System. One of the most relevant constraints that any formation model has to fulfill refers to its internal structure, with a predominant…
We explore the hypothesis that, due to small van der Waals forces between constituent grains, small rubble pile asteroids have a small but non-zero cohesive strength. The nature of this model predicts that the cohesive strength should be…
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…
In this work, we employ a soft-sphere discrete element method with a cohesion implementation to model the dynamical process of sub-km-sized cohesive rubble piles under continuous spinup. The dependencies of critical spin periods $T_c$ on…
Radar observations show that (16) Psyche is one of the largest and most massive asteroids of the M-class located in the main belt, with a diameter of approximately 230 km. This fact makes Psyche a unique object since observations indicated…
We investigate mantle stripping giant impacts (GI) between super-Earths with masses between 1 M$_{\oplus}$ and 20 M$_{\oplus}$. We infer new scaling laws for the mass of the largest fragment and its iron mass fraction, as well as updated…
In this paper we investigate the formation of narrow planetary rings such as those found around Uranus and Saturn through the tidal disruption of a weak, gravitationally bound satellite that migrates within its Roche limit. Using $N$-body…
Asteroids are leftover pieces from the era of planet formation that help us understand conditions in the early Solar System. Unlike larger planetary bodies that were subject to global thermal modification during and subsequent to their…
During close approaches to planets or stars, the morphological and dynamical properties of rubble-pile small bodies can be modified, and some may catastrophically break up. This phenomenon is of particular interest for understanding the…
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…
This work analyzes the energetics of asteroid rubble piles in order to understand what asteroid morphologies should naturally arise from their formation and evolution process. In doing this, a phase diagram is developed that maps out the…
A large population of planetary candidates in short-period orbits have been found through transit searches. Radial velocity surveys have also revealed several Jupiter-mass planets with highly eccentric orbits. Measurements of the…
The size distribution of asteroids in the solar system suggests that they formed top-down, with 100-1000 km bodies forming from the gravitational collapse of dense clumps of small solid particles. We investigate the conditions under which…
Much of the Earth was built by high-energy impacts of planetesimals and embryos, many of these impactors already differentiated, with metallic cores of their own. Geochemical data provide critical information on the timing of accretion and…
Asteroid shapes and satellites: role of gravitational reaccumulation. Following current evidences, it is widely accepted that many asteroids would be "gravitational aggregates", i.e. bodies lacking internal cohesion. They could mainly be…