Dr Philip J Carter

January 2022: Congratulations Dr Denman!
Dr Thomas Denman passed his viva in November and has now been awarded his PhD!

You can read about Dr Denman's work on collisions of Super-Earths at Explore Bristol Research.

January 2022: Gadget2-planetary
The planetary version of the SPH code Gadget2 is now available on GitHub!

August 2020: Colliding in the shadows of giants – Carter & Stewart (2020)
In this paper, available on arXiv and soon to be published in The Planetary Science Journal, we investigate planetesimal–planetesimal collisions during the growth and migration of giant planets. Gas giant migration induces large numbers of high velocity collisions between planetesimals, many of which can cause shock-vaporization of planetesimal materials.

June 2020: Denman et al. (2020) – Atmosphere loss in planet–planet collisions
Thomas Denman, a grad student at the University of Bristol I co-advise, had his first first-author paper published! In this work we modeled the loss of atmosphere in collisions between mini-Neptune and super-Earth sized planets. We found that a single collision cannot remove all the atmosphere without also removing a significant fraction of the mantle.
Read the paper in MNRAS or download from arXiv.

February 2020: JGR Planets cover
Our paper on energy budgets in giant impacts was chosen for the cover of the latest issue of JGR Planets!

January 2020: Are exoplanetesimals differentiated? – Bonsor et al. (2020)
Short answer: yes.
In this paper by Bonsor et al., available on arXiv and published in MNRAS, we compare calcium and iron abundances from a large sample of polluted white dwarfs with expected distributions from collisionally processed, differentiated planetesimals. We find that the data are best explained by 66–100% of white dwarfs having accreted the remains of differentiated bodies.