Related papers: Asteroids in the Inner Solar System II - Observabl…
The increasing precision of planetary mass and radius observations is bringing major questions about the structure and formation of planets--such as the nature of the radius valley and origin of super-Mercuries--within reach, demanding the…
(4) Vesta and (9) Metis are large main-belt asteroids with high albedos. With millimetre-observations at 93.0 and 95.5 GHz we characterised the emission properties of the surface material. The coverage of the full rotation period allowed a…
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…
A successful solar system model must reproduce the four terrestrial planets. Here, we focus on 1) the likelihood of forming Mercury and the four terrestrial planets in the same system (a 4-P system); 2) the orbital properties and masses of…
We describe how meteors recorded at the Earth can be used to partly reconstruct the meteoroid environments of the planets if a large sample (i.e. millions of orbits at a minimum) is available. The process involves selecting from the…
Containing only a few percent the mass of the moon, the current asteroid belt is around three to four orders of magnitude smaller that its primordial mass inferred from disk models. Yet dynamical studies have shown that the asteroid belt…
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.…
The Hungaria asteroid group is located interior to the main asteroid belt, with semimajor axes between 1.8 and 2 AU, low eccentricities and inclinations of 16-35 degrees. Recently, it has been proposed that Hungaria asteroids are a…
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…
Many features of the outer solar system are replicated in numerical simulations if the giant planets undergo an orbital instability that ejects one or more ice giants. During this instability, Jupiter and Saturn's orbits diverge, crossing…
We study the evolution of debris created in the giant impacts expected during the final stages of terrestrial planet formation. The starting point is the debris created in a simulation of the Moon-forming impact. The dynamical evolution is…
The bulk density of an asteroid informs us about its interior structure and composition. To constrain the bulk density one needs an estimate for the mass of the asteroid. The mass is estimated by analyzing an asteroid's gravitational…
Given their tendency to be incorporated into the core during differentiation, the highly-siderophile elements (HSEs) in Earth's mantle are thought to have been accreted as a `late veneer' after the end of the giant impact phase. Bottke et…
So far, multiple stellar systems harbor more than 130 extra solar planets. Dynamical simulations show that the outcome of planetary formation process can lead to various planetary architecture (i.e. location, size, mass and water content)…
Material arriving at our solar system from the Galaxy may be detected at Earth in the form of meteors ablating in our atmosphere. Here we report on a search for interstellar meteors within the highest-quality events in the Global Meteor…
Uranus and Saturn share similarities in terms of their atmospheric composition, which is primarily made up of hydrogen and helium, as well as their ring systems. Uranus has 13 known rings, which are divided into narrow main rings, dusty…
Recent high precision meteoritic data infers that Mars finished its accretion rapidly within 10 Myr of the beginning of the Solar system and had an accretion zone that did not entirely overlap with the Earth's. Here we present a detailed…
We describe in this work a thorough study of the physical and orbital characteristics of extensively observed main-belt and Trojan binaries, mainly taken from the LAOSA (Large Adaptive Optics Survey of Asteroids, Marchis et al., 2006c)…
The extrasolar planetary system around HR 8799 is the first multiplanet system ever imaged. It is also, by a wide margin, the highest mass system with >27 Jupiters of planetary mass past 25 AU. This is a remarkable system with no analogue…
The three-planet extrasolar system of HD 181433 has been detected with HARPS. The best-fit solution, announced by the discovery team, describes a highly unstable, self-disrupting configuration. In fact, a narrow observational window, only…