The formation of planetesimals, the kilometer-sized planetary precursors, is still a puzzling
process. Considerable progress has been made over the past years in the physical …

In 1989, Sir Sam Edwards made the visionary proposition to treat jammed granular materials
using a volume ensemble of equiprobable jammed states in analogy to thermal equilibrium …

Accumulation of dust and ice particles into planetesimals is an important step in the planet
formation process. Planetesimals are the seeds of both terrestrial planets and the solid cores …

Context. The growth processes from protoplanetary dust to planetesimals are not fully
understood. Laboratory experiments and theoretical models have shown that collisions …

Context. We investigate the formation and evolution of comet nuclei and other trans-
Neptunian objects (TNOs) in the solar nebula and primordial disk prior to the giant planet …

After 25 years of laboratory research on protoplanetary dust agglomeration, a consistent
picture of the various processes that involve colliding dust aggregates has emerged …

Non-destructive, non-contaminating, and relatively simple procedures can be used to
measure the bulk density, grain density, and porosity of meteorites. Most stony meteorites …

Before Rosetta, the space missions Giotto and Stardust shaped our view on cometary dust,
supported by plentiful data from Earth based observations and interplanetary dust particles …

The knowledge of the tensile strength of astrophysical dust and ice aggregates is of major
importance to understand the early stages of planet formation in our solar system and …

Protoplanetary disks exhibit a vertical gradient in angular momentum, rendering them
susceptible to the vertical shear instability (VSI). The most important condition for the onset …