Related papers: Solar System: Sifting through the debris
All the four giant planets in our Solar System have rings, but their characteristics are very different. The rings consist of a number of small particles, although individual particles have not been directly imaged. Near the central planet,…
By telescopic tracking, we have established that the orbit of the trans-neptunian object (2000 CR$_{105}$) has a perihelion of $\simeq$44 AU, and is thus outside the domain controlled by strong gravitational close encounters with Neptune.…
Recent observations have confirmed the existence of rings around minor bodies in the outer Solar System. These objects may possess satellites as well. Here we analytically investigate the interaction between such rings and satellites. We…
In two recent papers published in MNRAS, Namouni and Morais (2018, 2020) claimed evidence for the interstellar origin of some small Solar System bodies, including i) objects in retrograde co-orbital motion with the giant planets, and ii)…
The discovery and characteristics of transneptunian binaries are reviewed. In the 20 years since their first discovery, a wealth of detail has emerged including the frequency of binaries in different populations, their relative sizes and…
The Solar System hosts the most studied and best understood major and minor planetary bodies - and the only extraterrestrial bodies to have been visited by spacecraft. The Solar System therefore provides important constraints on both the…
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
In recent years a paradigm shift has occurred in exoplanet science, wherein low-mass stars are increasingly viewed as a foundational pillar of the search for potentially habitable worlds in the solar neighborhood. However, the formation…
In part I, using an effective computational approach, we have reconstructed the population of dust sources between Jupiter and Neptune. Here, in part II, we present the results on distribution of dust produced by 157 real sources (100…
This article relates two topics of central importance in modern astronomy - the discovery some fifteen years ago of the first planets around other stars (exoplanets), and the centuries-old problem of understanding the origin of our own…
The inner Solar System contains a cloud of small (1-100 micron) dust grains created when small bodies-asteroids, comets, and Kuiper belt objects-collide and outgas. This dust cloud, the zodiacal cloud probably has extrasolar analogs,…
The search for extrasolar Earth-like planets is underway. Over 100 extrasolar giant planets are known to orbit nearby sun-like stars, including several in multiple-planet systems. These planetary systems are stepping stones for the search…
We determine the density and mass distribution of dark matter within our Solar System. We explore the three-body interactions between dark matter particles, the Sun, and the planets to compute the amount of dark matter gravitationally…
It has been recently pointed out that any primary galactic population of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMP) generates, through collisions with solar matter, a secondary population of ``slow'' WIMPs trapped in the inner solar…
Exoplanets number in their thousands, and the number is ever increasing with the advent of new surveys and improved instrumentation. One of the most surprising things we have learnt from these discoveries is not that small-rocky planets in…
The under-abundance of asteroids on orbits with small perihelion distances suggests that thermally-driven disruption may be an important process in the removal of rocky bodies in the Solar System. Here we report our study of how the debris…
Various dynamically important extragalactic large-scale structures in the local Universe lie behind the Milky Way. Most of these structures (predicted and unexpected) have only recently been made ``visible'' through dedicated deep surveys…
Irregular satellites are the minor bodies found orbiting all four Solar System giant planets, with large semi-major axes, eccentricities, and inclinations. Previous studies have determined that the Solar System's irregular satellites are…
Debris disks are optically thin, almost gas-free dusty disks observed around a significant fraction of main-sequence stars older than about 10 Myr. Since the circumstellar dust is short-lived, the very existence of these disks is considered…
Rings around giant exoplanets (hereafter 'exorings') are still a missing planetary phenomenon among the vast number of discovered planets. Despite the fact there exist a large number of methods for identifying and characterizing these…