Related papers: Origin and Dynamical Evolution of Comets and their…
The New Horizons mission to the Kuiper Belt has recently revealed intriguing features on the surface of Charon, including a network of chasmata, cutting across or around a series of high topography features, conjoining to form a belt. It is…
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…
Dynamically excited objects within the Kuiper belt show a bimodal distribution in their surface colors, and these differing surface colors may be a tracer of where these objects formed. In this work we explore radial color distributions in…
The asteroid belt is an open window on the history of the Solar System, as it preserves records of both its formation process and its secular evolution. The progenitors of the present-day asteroids formed in the Solar Nebula almost…
Over the course of the past two decades, observational surveys have unveiled the intricate orbital structure of the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy bodies orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. In addition to a host of readily-predictable orbital…
This pedagogical chapter covers the theory of planet formation, with an emphasis on the physical processes relevant to current research. After summarizing empirical constraints from astronomical and geophysical data, we describe the…
A novel explanation for the origin of the cometary globules within NGC 7293 (the "Helix" planetary nebula) is examined; that these globules originate as massive cometary bodies at large astrocentric radii. The mass of such hypothetical…
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…
Molecular oxygen has been confirmed as the fourth most abundant molecule in cometary material O$_2$/H$_2$O $\sim 4$ %) and is thought to have a primordial nature, i.e., coming from the interstellar cloud from which our solar system was…
In the late stages of accretion leading up to the formation of planetesimals, particles grew to pebbles the size of 1-mm to tens of cm. That is the same size range that dominates the present-day comet mass loss. Meteoroids that size cause…
This chapter of the book Planetary Ring Systems addresses the origin of planetary rings, one of the least understood processes related to planet formation and evolution. Whereas rings seem ubiquitous around giant planets, their great…
Understanding the origin of comets requires knowledge of how the Solar System formed from a cloud of dust and gas 4.567 Gyr ago. Here, a review is presented of how the remnants of this formation process, meteorites and to a lesser extent…
We employ an efficient numerical approach to simulate a stationary distribution of test objects, which results from their gravitational scattering on the four giant planets, with accounting for effects of mean motion resonances. Using the…
The objectives of this project are to predict new meteor showers associated with as many as possible known periodic comets and to find a generic relationship of some already known showers with these comets. For a potential parent comet, we…
Large and deep depressions, also known as pits, are observed at the surface of all Jupiter Family Comets (JFCs) imaged by spacecraft missions. They offer the opportunity to glimpse into sub-surface characteristics of comet nuclei, and study…
We numerically integrated the orbits of 1458 particles in the region of the classical Kuiper Belt (41 AU < a < 47 AU) to explore the role of dynamical instabilities in sculpting the inclination distribution of the classical Kuiper Belt…
The long-term dynamical evolution of a Keplerian binary orbit due to the emission and absorption of gravitational radiation is investigated. This work extends our previous results on transient chaos in the planar case to the three…
Collisions are one of the key processes shaping planetary systems. Asteroid families are outcomes of such collisions still identifiable across our solar system. The families provide a unique view of catastrophic disruption phenomena and…
The origin of the Halley-type comets (HTCs) is one of the last mysteries of the dynamical evolution of the Solar System. Prior investigation into their origin has focused on two source regions: the Oort cloud and the Scattered Disc. From…
We present Monte Carlo simulations of the dynamical evolution of the Oort cloud over the age of the Solar System, using an initial sample of one million test comets without any cloning. Our model includes perturbations due to the Galactic…