Related papers: Dynamical Evolution of V-Shaped Collision Debris
There is increasing evidence that many km-sized bodies in the Solar System are piles of rubble bound together by gravity. We present results from a project to map the parameter space of collisions between km-sized spherical rubble piles.…
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…
Planetary rings sustain a continual bombardment of hypervelocity meteoroids that erode the surfaces of ring particles on time scales of 10^5 - 10^7 years. The debris ejected from such impacts re-accretes on to the ring, though often at a…
Instabilities and strong dynamical interactions between multiple giant planets have been proposed as a possible explanation for the surprising orbital properties of extrasolar planetary systems. In particular, dynamical instabilities seem…
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…
The increasing number of extra-solar planets opens a new opportunity for studies of the formation of planetary systems. Resonant systems are of particular interest because their dynamical configuration provides constraints on the…
The origin of the irregular satellites of the giant planets has been long debated since their discovery. Their dynamical features argue against an in-situ formation suggesting they are captured bodies, yet there is no global consensus on…
Binary asteroid formation is a highly complex process, which has been highlighted with recent observations of satellites with unexpected shapes, such as the oblate Dimorphos by the NASA DART mission and the contact binary Selam by NASA's…
Saturn's rings, reminiscent of an early Solar System present a unique opportunity to investigate experimentally some mechanisms thought to be responsible for planet and planetesimal formation in protoplanetary discs. Here we extended the…
Since 2004, observations of Saturn's F ring have revealed that the ring's core is surrounded by structures with radial scales of hundreds of kilometers, called "spirals" and "jets". Gravitational scattering by nearby moons was suggested as…
The last phase of the formation of rocky planets is dominated by collisions among Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos. Simulations of this phase need to handle the difficulty of including the post-impact material without saturating the…
We have discovered long-lived waves in two sets of numerical models of fast (marginally bound or unbound) flyby galaxy collisions, carried out independently with two different codes. In neither simulation set are the spirals the result of a…
Extreme debris disks can show short term behaviour through the evolution and clearing of small grains produced in giant impacts, and potentially a longer period of variability caused by a planetesimal population formed from giant impact…
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…
Compact object clusters are likely to exist in the centre of some galaxies because of mass segregation. The high densities and velocities reached in them deserves a better understanding. The formation of binaries and their subsequent…
We present results from large-scale particle simulations of the viscous overstability in Saturn's rings. The overstability generates a variety of structure on scales covering a few hundred metres to several kilometres, including…
The gravitational instability model of planet/brown dwarf formation proposes that protostellar discs can fragment into objects with masses above a few Jupiter masses at large semimajor axis. Tidal downsizing may reduce both the object mass…
How do galaxies move relative to one another? While we can examine the motion of dark matter subhalos around their hosts in simulations of structure formation, determining the orbits of satellites around their parent galaxies from…
Pluto's system of 5 known satellites are in a puzzling orbital configuration. Each of the four small satellites are on low-eccentricity and low-inclination orbits situated near a mean motion resonance with the largest satellite Charon. The…
We simulated the long-term collisional depletion of debris disks around solar-type (G2V) stars with our code. The numerical results were supplemented by, and interpreted through, a new analytic model. A few general scaling rules for the…