Related papers: Comet and Asteroid Hazard to the Terrestrial Plane…
One focus of modern astronomy is to detect temperate terrestrial exoplanets well-suited for atmospheric characterisation. A milestone was recently achieved with the detection of three Earth-sized planets transiting (i.e. passing in front…
Jupiter-family Comet D/1770 L1 (Lexell) was the first discovered Near-Earth Object (NEO), and passed the Earth on 1770 Jul 1 at a recorded distance of 0.015 au. The comet was subsequently lost due to unfavorable observing circumstances…
The longitudes of perihelia and orbital poles of the solar system's dozen or so most remote detected objects are clustered in a manner inconsistent with that of a random sample of uniformly distributed orbits. While small number statistics…
The discovery of Jupiter-mass planets in close orbits about their parent stars has challenged models of planet formation. Recent observations have shown that a number of these planets have highly inclined, sometimes retrograde orbits about…
We investigate the distribution of encounter velocities and impact angles describing collisions in the habitable zone of the early planetary system. Here we present a catalogue of collision characteristics for a particular mass ratio of the…
The Sun's gradual brightening will seriously compromise the Earth's biosphere within ~ 1E9 years. If Earth's orbit migrates outward, however, the biosphere could remain intact over the entire main-sequence lifetime of the Sun. In this…
The complete sample of large-perihelion nearly-parabolic comets discovered during the period 1901-2010 is studied starting from their orbit determination. Next, an orbital evolution that includes three perihelion passages…
Planetary systems with multiple transiting planets are beneficial for understanding planet occurrence rates and system architectures. Although we have yet to find a solar system analogue, future surveys may detect multiple terrestrial…
The discovery of planetary systems beyond our solar system has challenged established theories of planetary formation. Planetary orbits display a variety of unexpected architectures, and free-floating planets appear ubiquitous. The recent…
We suppose that some large trans-Neptunian objects could be formed directly by the compression of rarefied dust condensations of the protoplanetary disk, but not by the accretion of smaller planetesimals. About 0.0015 of former…
All planets and satellites of our solar system are subject to a continuous rain of material, ranging in size from specks of dust to objects the size of boulders. Upon impact, these objects deposit their kinetic energy into the incident…
A number of Earth co-orbital asteroids experience repeated transitions between the quasi-satellite and horseshoe dynamical states. Asteroids 2001 GO2, 2002 AA29, 2003 YN107 and 2015 SO2 are well-documented cases of such a dynamical…
We extend previous results showing that the surfaces of Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt objects are not primordial and have been moderately to heavily reworked by collisions. Objects smaller than about $r = 2.5$ km have collisional disruption…
As a comet, asteroid or planet approaches its parent star, the orbit changes shape due to the curvature of spacetime. For comets in particular, the deviation at the pericentre may noticeably change their ephemerides and affect the dynamics…
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 investigated the probability that an inelastic collision of planetesimals within the Hill sphere of the Jovian planets could explain the presence and orbits of observed irregular satellites. Capture of satellites via this mechanism is…
Most co-orbital objects in the Solar system are thought to follow tadpole-type orbits, behaving as Trojans. However, most of Earth's identified co-orbitals are moving along horseshoe-type orbits. The current tally of minor bodies considered…
Context. The paths followed by the known extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs) effectively avoid direct gravitational perturbations from the four giant planets, yet their orbital eccentricities are in the range between 0.69-0.97. Solar…
We have evaluated the rate at which the asteroid belt is losing material, and how it splits between macroscopic bodies and meteoritic dust. The mass loss process is due to the injection of asteroid fragments into unstable dynamical regions,…
The near-Earth objects with low-Jovian Tisserand invariant ($T_J$) represent about 9 per cent of the known objects orbiting in the near-Earth space, being subject of numerous planetary encounters and large temperature variations. We aim to…