Related papers: Possible Long-Lived Asteroid Belts in the Inner So…
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…
We investigate the orbital dynamics of four-planet systems consisting of Earth-mass planets on initially-circular, coplanar orbits around a star of one solar mass. In our simulations, the innermost planet's semimajor axis is set at 1 AU,…
Satellites of asteroids have been discovered in nearly every known small body population, and a remarkable aspect of the known satellites is the diversity of their properties. They tell a story of vast differences in formation and evolution…
The past decade has brought major improvements in large-scale asteroid discovery and characterization with over half a million known asteroids and over 100,000 with some measurement of physical characterization. This explosion of data has…
Recent observations indicate that >99% of the small bodies in the Solar System reside in its outer reaches --- in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Kuiper Belt bodies are probably the best preserved representatives of the icy planetesimals…
Observations of the Kuiper Belt indicate that a larger than expected percentage of KBO's (approximately 8 out of 500) are in binary pairs. The formation and survival of such objects presents a conundrum [1]. Two competing theories have been…
We review previously published and newly obtained crater size-frequency distributions in the inner solar system. These data indicate that the Moon and the terrestrial planets have been bombarded by two populations of objects. Population 1,…
Applying the technique of dynamical maps we study the orbital stability of test particles in the Solar System in the space (a,e,i) defined by 0.1<a<38 au, 0<e<0.9 and 0<i<180 identifying the unstable and stable regions. We find stable…
Mean motion resonances (MMRs) can lead either to chaotic or regular motion. We report on a numerical experiment showing that even in one of the most chaotic regions of the Solar System - the region of the giant planets, there are numerous…
Exoplanets orbiting in the habitable zone around M-dwarf stars have been prime targets in the search for life due to the long lifetimes of the host star, the prominence of such stars in the galaxy, and the apparent excess of terrestrial…
Asteroid families are groups of minor bodies produced by high-velocity collisions. After the initial dispersions of the parent bodies fragments, their orbits evolve because of several gravitational and non-gravitational effects,such as…
Many of the multi-planet systems discovered to date have been notable for their compactness, with neighbouring planets closer together than any in the Solar System. Interestingly, planet-hosting stars have a wide range of ages, suggesting…
Photometry from the Helios and STEREO spacecraft revealed regions of enhanced sky surface-brightness suggesting a narrow circumsolar ring of dust associated with Venus's orbit. We model this phenomenon by integrating the orbits of…
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…
Outer satellites of the planets have distant, eccentric orbits that can be highly inclined or even retrograde relative to the equatorial planes of their planets. These irregular orbits cannot have formed by circumplanetary accretion and are…
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…
Astronomical observations reveal that protoplanetary disks around young stars commonly have ring- and gap-like structures in their dust distributions. These features are associated with pressure bumps trapping dust particles at specific…
The Solar system beyond Neptune is believed to house a population of small primordial bodies left over from the planet formation process. The region up to heliocentric distance $\sim 50 AU$ (a.k.a. the Kuiper Belt) may be the source of the…
Containing only a few percent the mass of the moon, the current asteroid belt is around three to four orders of magnitude smaller that its primordial mass inferred from disk models. Yet dynamical studies have shown that the asteroid belt…
Planetary systems formed in clusters may be subject to stellar encounter flybys. Here we create a diverse range of representative planetary systems with different orbital scales and planets' masses and examine encounters between them in a…