相关论文: From Centaurs to comets - 40 years

The Oort cloud is usually thought of as a collection of icy comets inhabiting the outer reaches of the Solar system, but this picture is incomplete. We use simulations of the formation of the Oort cloud to show that ~4% of the small bodies…

Globular clusters produce orders of magnitude more millisecond pulsars per unit mass than the Galactic disk. Since the first cluster pulsar was uncovered twenty years ago, at least 138 have been identified - most of which are binary…

The nature of pulsar-like compact stars is still in controversy although the first pulsar was found more than 40 years ago. Generally speaking, conventional neutron stars and non-mainstream quark stars are two types of models to describe…

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…

We have started since 1997 the Meudon Multicolor Survey of Outer Solar System Objects with the aim of collecting a large and homogeneous set of color data for Trans-Neptunian and Centaurs objects [...] We have a combined sample of 52 B-R…

(modified from published version) Twelve years ago the Catalina Sky Survey discovered Earth's first known natural geocentric object other than the Moon, a few-meter diameter asteroid designated 2006 RH120. Despite significant improvements…

We have measured the mid-infrared thermal continua from two Centaurs, inactive (8405) Asbolus and active 95P=(2060) Chiron, and have constrained their geometric albedos, p, and effective radii, R, with the Standard Thermal Model for slow…

It is a well-known fact that the presence of a massive perturber interacting with a population of minor bodies following very eccentric orbits can strongly affect the distribution of their nodal distances. The details of this process have…

The Scattered Disk Objects (SDOs) are a population of trans-Neptunian bodies with semimajor axes $50< a \lesssim 1000$ au and perihelion distances $q \gtrsim 30$ au. The detached SDOs with orbits beyond the reach of Neptune (roughly…

Comets are primitive objects that formed in the protoplanetary disk, and have been largely preserved over the history of the Solar System. However, they are not pristine, and surfaces of cometary nuclei do evolve. In order to understand the…

Centaurs are inward-scattered Kuiper belt objects, with some exhibiting comet-like activity. The physical mechanisms powering this activity remain poorly understood, with carbon monoxide (CO) sublimation or the crystallization of amorphous…

Solar system Centaurs originate in transneptunian space from where planet orbit crossing events inject their orbits inside the giant planets' domain. Here, we examine this injection process in the three-body problem by studying the orbital…

We present the results of "snapshot" numerical integrations of test particles representing comet-like and asteroid-like objects in the inner solar system aimed at investigating the short-term dynamical evolution of objects close to the…

The measurements of cosmic interplanetary dust by the instruments on board the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft contain the dynamical signature of dust generated by Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt objects, as well as short period Oort Cloud comets and…

Binaries have played a crucial role many times in the history of modern astronomy and are doing so again in the rapidly evolving exploration of the Kuiper Belt. The large fraction of transneptunian objects that are binary or multiple, 48…

The discovery of Sedna places new constraints on the origin and evolution of our solar system. Here we investigate the possibility that a close encounter with another star produced the observed edge of the Kuiper belt, at roughly 50 AU, and…

We extend previous results showing that the surfaces of Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt objects are not primordial and have been moderately to heavily reworked by collisions. Objects smaller than about $r = 2.5$ km have collisional disruption…

The goal of this chapter is to review hypotheses for the origin of the Pluto system in light of observational constraints that have been considerably refined over the 85-year interval between the discovery of Pluto and its exploration by…

The Centaur population is composed by minor bodies wandering between the giant planets and that frequently perform close gravitational encounters with these planets, which leads to a chaotic orbital evolution. Recently, the discovery of two…

Numerical simulations suggest that Neptune primordial co-orbitals may outnumber the equivalent population hosted by Jupiter, yet the objects remain elusive. Since the first discovery in 2001 just 10 minor planets have been identified as…