Related papers: Solar System: Sifting through the debris
Although there is abundant and diverse observational evidence in support of white dwarf stars hosting planets or debris disks which form in the catastrophic destruction of various planetary bodies, the key processes that explain these…
We present a method to identify distant solar system objects in long-term wide-field asteroid survey data, and conduct a search for them in the Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) image data acquired from 2010 to mid-2015. We demonstrate that our method is…
The most pristine remnants of the Solar system's planet formation epoch orbit the Sun beyond Neptune, the small bodies of the trans-Neptunian object populations. The bulk of the mass is in ~100 km objects, but objects at smaller sizes have…
Since the 1980's it has been becoming increasingly clear that the Solar System's irregular satellites are collisionally evolved. We derive a general model for the collisional evolution of an irregular satellite swarm and apply it to the…
The architecture and evolution of planetary systems are shaped in part by stellar flybys. Within this context, we look at stellar encounters which are too weak to immediately destabilize a planetary system but are nevertheless strong enough…
The chaotic behaviour of the motion of the planets in our Solar System is well established. In this work to model a hypothetical extrasolar planetary system our Solar System was modified in such a way that we replaced the Earth by a more…
Observed hyperbolic minor bodies might have an interstellar origin, but they can be natives of the Solar system as well. Fly-bys with the known planets or the Sun may result in the hyperbolic ejection of an originally bound minor body; in…
The Pluto system is an archetype for the multitude of icy dwarf planets and accompanying satellite systems that populate the vast volume of the solar system beyond Neptune. New Horizons' exploration of Pluto and its five moons gave us a…
A reasonable basis for future astronomical investigations of exoplanets lies in our best knowledge of the planets and satellites in the Solar System. Solar System bodies exhibit a wide variety of surface environments, even including…
The vast diversity of planetary systems detected to date is defying our capability of understanding their formation and evolution. Well-defined volume-limited surveys are the best tool at our disposal to tackle the problem, via the…
The physical basis of chaos in the solar system is now better understood: in all cases investigated so far, chaotic orbits result from overlapping resonances. Perhaps the clearest examples are found in the asteroid belt. Overlapping…
Future remote sensing of exoplanets will be enhanced by a thorough investigation of our solar system Ice Giants (Neptune-size planets). What can the configuration of the magnetic field tell us (remotely) about the interior, and what…
We have recently hit the milestone of 5,000 exoplanets discovered. In stark contrast with the Solar System, most of the exoplanets we know to date orbit extremely close to their host stars, causing them to lose copious amounts of gas…
Orbital resonances are ubiquitous in the Solar system. They play a decisive role in the long term dynamics, and in some cases the physical evolution, of the planets and of their natural satellites, as well as the evolution of small bodies…
Exocomets are small bodies releasing gas and dust which orbit stars other than the Sun. Their existence was first inferred from the detection of variable absorption features in stellar spectra in the late 1980s using spectroscopy. More…
We compile a systematic mass inventory of the Solar System excluding the Sun, drawing on spacecraft measurements, planetary ephemerides, and population surveys of small-body populations including main-belt asteroids and trans-Neptunian…
The stellar debris structures that have been discovered around the Milky Way and other galaxies are thought to be formed from the disruption of satellite stellar systems --- dwarf galaxies or globular clusters --- by galactic tidal fields.…
Rings are ubiquitous around giant planets in our Solar System. They evolve jointly with the nearby satellite system. They could form either during the giant planet formation process or much later, as a result of large scale dynamical…
Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered and the search for life outside Earth is at the forefront of astrophysical research. The planets we observe show a mind-blowing diversity that current theories strive to explain as part of the…
We update our analysis of recent exoplanet data that gives us a partial answer to the question: How does our Solar System compare to the other planetary systems in the Universe? Exoplanets detected between January and August 2002 strengthen…