Related papers: Cometary diversity and cometary families

It is unknown if an Oort cloud reaches its maximum mass within its star's birth cluster or millions of years later. Complicating the Oort cloud evolution process is the fact that comets can be stripped from orbit due to perturbations from…

In this study, we numerically investigated the orbital evolution of cometary dust particles, with special consideration of the initial size frequency distribution (SFD) and different evolutionary tracks according to initial orbit and…

The short period Jupiter family comets (JFCs) are thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt; specifically, a dynamical subclass of the Kuiper Belt known as the `scattered disk' is argued to be the dominant source of JFCs. However, the best…

Comets contain abundant amounts of organic and inorganic species. Many of the volatile molecules in comets have also been observed in the interstellar medium and some of them even with similar relative abundances, indicating formation under…

Drain away the earth's oceans and a global pattern of great ridges appears. Adjacent to these continental and undersea mountain ranges are layers of silt and clay, so thick that they fill the gaps between ridges, creating extensive…

Low-mass protostars are the extrasolar analogues of the natal Solar System. Sophisticated physicochemical models are used to simulate the formation of two protoplanetary discs from the initial prestellar phase, one dominated by viscous…

We analyze a sample of 73 old long-period comets (LPCs) (orbital periods $200 < P < 1000$ yr) with perihelion distances $q < 2.5$ au, discovered in the period 1850-2014. We cloned the observed comets and also added fictitious LPCs with…

The Gaia space telescope has transformed our understanding of random stellar encounters with the Solar System. This study examines how such perturbations influence the most eccentric comets in the Oort Cloud (OC), a thermalized reservoir of…

Wide-orbit exoplanets are starting to be detected, and planetary formation models are under development to understand their properties. We propose a population of "Oort" planets around other stars, forming by a mechanism analogous to how…

Comets are believed to be born in the outer Solar System where the temperature is assumed to have never exceeded T ~ 100 K. Surprisingly, observations and samples of cometary dust particles returned to Earth showed that they are in fact…

Starting from planetary systems with three giant planets and an outer disk of planetesimals, we use dynamical simulations to show how dynamical instabilities can transform planetesimal disks into 100-1000 AU-scale isotropic clouds. The…

Dust jets, i.e. fuzzy collimated streams of cometary material arising from the nucleus, have been observed in-situ on all comets since the Giotto mission flew by comet 1P/Halley in 1986. Yet their formation mechanism remains unknown.…

[Abridged] The detection of abundant O$_{2}$ ice at 1-10% with respect to H$_{2}$O ice in the comae of comets 1P/Halley and 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko motivated attempts to explain the origin of the high O$_{2}$ ice abundance. Recent…

The proposed CUBES spectrograph for ESO's Very Large Telescope will be an exceptionally powerful instrument for the study of comets. The gas coma of a comet contains a large number of emission features in the near-UV range covered by CUBES…

When comet nuclei approach the Sun, the increasing energy flux through the surface layers leads to sublimation of the underlying ices and subsequent outgassing that promotes the observed emission of gas and dust. The ejection of dust…

Comets have similar compositions to interstellar medium ices, suggesting at least some of their molecules maybe inherited from an earlier stage of evolution. To investigate the degree to which this might have occurred we compare the…

Remote observations of comets, especially using high spectral resolution millimeter spectroscopy, have enabled the detection of over 25 molecules in comets for the last twenty years. Among the molecules identified at radio wavelengths,…

In this chapter, we provide a review of radiative processes in cometary atmospheres spanning a broad range of wavelengths, from radio to X-rays. We focus on spectral modeling, observational opportunities, and anticipated challenges in the…

Complex organic molecules (COMs) are widely detected in protostellar and protoplanetary systems, where they are thought to have been inherited in large part from earlier evolutionary phases. The chemistry of COMs in these earlier phases,…

Small bodies are capable of delivering essential prerequisites for the development of life, such as volatiles and organics, to the terrestrial planets. For example, empirical evidence suggests that water was delivered to the Earth by…