Related papers: Collisional evolution in the Vulcanoid region: Imp…
Interior to the orbit of Mercury, between 0.07 and 0.21 AU, is a dynamically stable region where a population of asteroids, known as Vulcanoids, may reside. We present the results from our search for Vulcanoids using archival data from the…
The widely-separated, near-equal mass binaries hosted by the cold Classical Kuiper Belt are delicately bound and subject to disruption by many perturbing processes. We use analytical arguments and numerical simulations to determine their…
High resolution simulations are used to map out the detailed structure of two long-lived stable belts of asteroid orbits in the inner Solar system. The Vulcanoid belt extends from 0.09 to 0.20 astronomical units (au), though with a gaps at…
Models for the steady state collisional evolution of low eccentricity planetesimal belts identify debris disks with hot dust at 1AU, like eta Corvi and HD69830, as anomalous since collisional processing should have removed most of the…
Dynamical features of a massive disk of distant trans-Neptunian objects are considered in the model of the formation of small bodies in the Hill region of a giant gas-dust clump that arose as a result of gravitational instability and…
The population of Earth-impacting meteoroids and its size-dependent orbital elements are key to understanding the origin of meteorites and informing on planetary defence efforts. Outstanding questions include the role of collisions in…
We consider the long-term collisional and dynamical evolution of solid material orbiting in a narrow annulus near the Roche limit of a white dwarf. With orbital velocities of 300 km/sec, systems of solids with initial eccentricity $e…
Most meteorites are fragments from recent collisions experienced in the asteroid belt. In such a hyper-velocity collision, the smaller collision partner is destroyed, whereas a crater on the asteroid is formed or it is entirely disrupted,…
Due to their strong resonances with their host planet, Trojan asteroids can remain in stable orbits for billions of years. As a result, they are powerful probes for constraining the dynamical and chemical history of the solar system.…
The dynamical and physical properties of asteroid family members are widely used to reconstruct the collisional evolution of the main belt and of individual objects. Families offer insights into the properties of the parent bodies and the…
The classical habitable zone is the circular region around a star in which liquid water could exist on the surface of a rocky planet. The outer edge of the traditional N2-CO2-H2O habitable zone (HZ) extends out to nearly 1.7 AU in our Solar…
Here we show an example of a young asteroid cluster located in a dynamically stable region, which was produced by partial disruption of a primitive body about 30 km in size. We estimate its age to be only 1.9 +/- 0.3 Myr, thus its…
The zodiacal cloud is one of the largest structures in the solar system and strongly governed by meteoroid collisions near the Sun. Collisional erosion occurs throughout the zodiacal cloud, yet it is historically difficult to directly…
In this paper we study the role of dynamical friction on the evolution of a population of large objects ($m>10^{22}$ g) at heliocentric distances $>70$ AU in the Kuiper Belt. We show that the already flat distribution of these objects must…
This paper presents the results of collisional evolution calculations for the Kuiper belt starting from an initial size distribution similar to that produced by accretion simulations of that region - a steep power-law large object size…
The population of the Kuiper Belt within 50 AU of the Sun has likely been severely depleted by gravitational perturbations from the giant planets, particularly Neptune. The density of Kuiper Belt objects is expected to be two orders of…
Suggestions have been made that asteroid belts may be important both for the existence of life and perhaps even for the evolution of complex life on a planet. Using numerical models for protoplanetary discs we calculate the location of the…
At present, approximately 1500 asteroids are known to evolve inside or sticked to the exterior 1:2 resonance with Mars at a = 2.418 AU, being (142) Polana the largest member of this group. The effect of the forced secular modes superposed…
The existence of giant planets on wide orbits ($\stackrel{>}{_\sim}100$AU) challenge planet formation theories; the core accretion scenario has difficulty in forming them, whereas the disc instability model forms an overabundance of them…
This paper studies the dynamical evolution of young stellar clusters with $N$ = 100 - 1000 members. We use N-body simulations to explore how evolution depends on system size $N$ and the initial conditions. Motivated by recent observations…