Related papers: On the atmospheric fragmentation of small asteroid…
The current philosophy of impact hazard considers the danger from small asteroids negligible. However, several facts claim for a revision of this philosophy. In this paper, some of these facts are reviewed and discussed. It is worth noting…
This paper examines the questions of whether smaller asteroids that burst in the air over water can generate tsunamis that could pose a threat to distant locations. Such air burst-generated tsunamis are qualitatively different than the more…
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…
In recent years, nine small near-Earth asteroids were discovered a few hours before the collision with the Earth: these are about one meter in diameter objects that have all disintegrated in the atmosphere, generating bright fireballs…
The internal structure and strength of small asteroids and large meteoroids is poorly known. Observation of bright fireballs in the Earth's atmosphere can prospect meteoroid structure by studying meteoroid fragmentation during the flight.…
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.…
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…
The solar system's dynamical state can be explained by an orbital instability among the giant planets. A recent model has proposed that the giant planet instability happened during terrestrial planet formation. This scenario has been shown…
An asteroid family is typically formed when a larger parent body undergoes a catastrophic collisional disruption, and as such family members are expected to show physical properties that closely trace the composition and mineralogical…
From air-sea gas exchange, oil pollution, to bioreactors, the ubiquitous fragmentation of bubbles/drops in turbulence has been modelled by relying on the classical Kolmogorov-Hinze paradigm since the 1950s. This framework hypothesizes that…
Young asteroid families are unique sources of information about fragmentation physics and the structure of their parent bodies, since their physical properties have not changed much since their birth. Families have different properties such…
A cloud of gas collapsing under gravity will fragment. We present a new theory for this process, in which layers shocked gas fragment due to their gravitational instability. Our model explains why angular momentum does not inhibit the…
We examine the mechanisms by which atmosphere can be eroded by giant impacts onto Earth-like planets with thin atmospheres, using 3D smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations with sufficient resolution to directly model the fate of…
Everyday thousands of meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere. The vast majority burn up harmlessly during the descent, but the larger objects survive, occasionally experiencing intense fragmentation events, and reach the ground. These…
We investigate the kinetics of nonlinear collision-induced fragmentation. We obtain the fragment mass distribution analytically by utilizing its travelling wave behavior. The system undergoes a shattering transition in which a finite…
Observations with radar, photometric and direct imaging techniques have discovered that multiple asteroid systems can be divided clearly into a handful of different morphologies, and recently, the discovery of small unbound asteroid systems…
Observational data of asteroids can be explained by considering them as an agglomerate of granular material. Understanding the mechanical properties of these objects is relevant for many scientific reasons: space missions design, evaluation…
A tidal disruption event (TDE) occurs when a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole and gets torn apart by its gravitational tidal field. After the disruption, the stellar debris form an expanding gaseous stream. The morphology…
We present a simple analytic description of atmospheric mass loss by aerial bursts and demonstrate that mass loss from aerial bursts becomes significant when the maximum impactor size that leads to an aerial burst rather than a ground…
We review the main results from recent numerical simulations of turbulent fragmentation and star formation. Specifically, we discuss the observed scaling relationships, the ``quiescent'' (subsonic) nature of many star-forming cores, their…