Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
Although we have now started hitting comets and asteroids ourselves, most small body collisions are of the natural kind. We have now observed many asteroid or comet impacts in our Solar system. Not only do these studies fuel our Planetary Defence programmes, they give us insight into the collisional and accretion processes that go into shaping planetary systems. Further afield, small body collisions give rise to debris disks around young stars and polluted white dwarf photospheres. Finally, the discovery of the first interstellar objects has brought alive the possibility of cross-contamination between planetary systems in the Milky Way. This talk will briefly cover some of these advances in the past few decades, and highlight the ubiquitous effects of collisions in planetary systems.