Related papers: Where Did The Moon Come From?

The lunar farside highlands, referred to as the lunar farside thicker crust compared with the nearside crust, presents a challenge to the theory of formation and evolution of the Moon. Here, we show that, after the Moon reached synchronous…

Solid embryos of the Earth and the Moon, as well as trans-Neptunian binaries, could form as a result of contraction of the rarefied condensation which was parental for a binary. The angular momentum of the condensation needed for formation…

Subsequent to the Moon's formation, late accretion to the terrestrial planets modified their silicate crusts and mantles. We combine dynamical N-body and Monte Carlo simulations to determine impact probabilities, impact velocities, and…

Modern terrestrial planet formation models are highly successful at consistently generating planets with masses and orbits analogous to those of Earth and Venus. In stark contrast to classic theoretical predictions and inferred demographics…

Impactors of different types and sizes can produce a final crater of the same diameter on a planet under certain conditions. We derive the condition for such "isocrater impacts" from scaling laws, as well as relations that describe how the…

The Earth's obliquity is stabilized by the Moon, which facilitates a rapid precession of the Earth's spin-axis, de-tuning the system away from resonance with orbital modulation. It is however, likely that the architecture of the Solar…

The origin and early evolution of the Jovian moon Ganymede, known to have an internal ocean, have garnered considerable interest in the field of origin of satellites and life. Ganymede has an ancient impact structure, called a furrow…

Mars is likely to be a planetary embryo formed through collisions with planetesimals, which can explain its small mass and rapid formation timescale obtained from 182Hf-182$W chronometry. In the classical theory of planet formation, the…

We are preparing a telescope system to carry out a survey of detection and analysis of lunar impact flashes. In the framework of this project, here we present all necessary methods to automatically identify these luminous events, their…

This monograph presents a study of the nature and origin of meteorites, asteroids and comets; and of the consequences of encounters of these cosmic objects with the Earth. The purpose of this monograph is mainly of divulgation for…

Throughout the history of the solar system, Mars has experienced continuous asteroidal impacts. These impacts have produced impact-generated Mars ejecta, and a fraction of this debris is delivered to Earth as Martian meteorites. Another…

Of the few thousand discovered exoplanets, a significant number orbit in the habitable zone of their star. Many of them are gas giants lacking a rocky surface and solid water reservoirs necessary for life as we know it. The search for…

Impacts that leave the Earth-Moon system with a large excess in angular momentum have recently been advocated as a means of generating a protolunar disc with a composition that is nearly identical to that of the Earth's mantle. We here…

When the Moon was formed it was much closer to the Earth than it is today. It just needed about 20 days then to go around the Earth. Now it takes the Moon 29.5 days to make one revolution. In order to follow the conservation of angular…

In their model for the origin of the parent bodies of iron meteorites, Bottke et al proposed differentiated planetesimals that were formed in the region of 1-2 AU during the first 1.5 Myr, as the parent bodies, and suggested that these…

Giant impacts dominate the final stages of terrestrial planet formation and set the configuration and compositions of the final system of planets. A giant impact is believed to be responsible for the formation of Earth's Moon, but the…

Models of terrestrial planet formation for our solar system have been successful in producing planets with masses and orbits similar to those of Venus and Earth. However, these models have generally failed to produce Mars-sized objects…

The hypothesis of quantization of masses of the solar system planets is considered. It is supposed that the solar system was bearing during the Protosun squeezing from the red giant to a yellow dwarf. According to mass and orbit…

The goal of this chapter is to review hypotheses for the origin of the Pluto system in light of observational constraints that have been considerably refined over the 85-year interval between the discovery of Pluto and its exploration by…

This work examines the plausibility of a lunar origin of natural objects that have a negative total energy (ET) with respect to the geocenter while within 3 Earth Hill radii (RH), a population that we will refer to as 'bound'. They are a…