Related papers: Probing Interstellar Dust With Space-Based Coronag…
High contrast imaging can find and characterize gas giant planets around nearby young stars and the closest M stars, complementing radial velocity and astrometric searches by exploring orbital separations inaccessible to indirect methods.…
We use VLBA+VLA observations to measure the sizes of the scatter-broadened images of 6 of the most heavily scattered known pulsars: 3 within the Galactic Centre (GC) and 3 elsewhere in the inner Galactic plane. By combining the measured…
We consider the observation of diffuse halos of light around the discs of spiral galaxies, as a probe of the interaction cross section between Dark Matter and photons. Using the galaxy M101 as an example, we show that for a scattering cross…
We detect a cold, terrestrial planet in a binary-star system using gravitational microlensing. The planet has low mass (2 Earth masses) and lies projected at $a_{\perp,ph}$ ~ 0.8 astronomical units (AU) from its host star, similar to the…
Interstellar dust is still a dominant uncertainty in Astronomy, limiting precision in e.g., cosmological distance estimates and models of how light is re-processed within a galaxy. When a foreground galaxy serendipitously overlaps a more…
Spatially resolved scattered-light images of circumstellar (CS) debris in exoplanetary systems constrain the physical properties and orbits of the dust particles in these systems. They also inform on co-orbiting (but unseen) planets,…
This paper reports a blind search for magnetospheric emissions from planets around nearby stars. Young stars are likely to have much stronger stellar winds than the Sun, and because planetary magnetospheric emissions are powered by stellar…
The development of our understanding of the gaseous component of the interstellar medium is reviewed. During the 20th century our picture of diffuse material in space has grown from a simple model of isolated clouds in thermal equilibrium…
Scattered light echoes from variable and cataclysmic stars offer one of the most effective means to probe the structure and composition of circumtellar and interstellar media. I build a simple model of light-echo surface brightness by…
This review summarizes the observational characteristics of those interstellar grains which are prevented from entering the solar system by interactions with the heliopause. Such grains are typically less tha 100nm in radius, and they…
Exozodiacal dust, warm debris from comets and asteroids in and near the habitable zone of stellar systems, reveals the physical processes that shape planetary systems. Scattered light from this dust is also a source of background flux which…
Stars twinkle because their light propagates through the atmosphere. The same phenomenon is expected when the light of remote stars crosses a Galactic - disk or halo - refractive medium such as a molecular cloud.We present the promising…
Mid-infrared arcs of dust emission are often seen near ionizing stars within HII regions. A possible explanations for these arcs is that they could show the outer edges of asymmetric stellar wind bubbles. We use two-dimensional,…
Interstellar dust spans a wide range in size distribution, ranging from ultrasmall grains of a few Angstroms to micrometer-size grains. While the presence of nanometer-size dust grains in the Galactic interstellar medium was speculated six…
We report spectra obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope in the wavelength range between 14 microns and 35 microns of 19 nearby main-sequence stars with infrared excesses. The six stars with strong dust emission show no recognizable…
Aims: We offer a new, simpler picture of the local interstellar medium, made of a single continuous cloud enveloping the Sun. This new outlook enables the description of a diffuse cloud from within and brings to light some unexpected…
Galaxies are thought to grow through accretion; as less massive galaxies are disrupted and merge over time, their debris results in diffuse, clumpy stellar halos enveloping the central galaxy. Here we present a study of the variation in the…
We present potential detections of H-band scattered light emission around four young star, selected from a total sample of 45 young stars observed with the CIAO coronagraph of the Subaru telescope. Two CTTS, CI Tau and DI Cep, and two WTTS,…
We revisit the possibility of detecting an extrasolar planet around a background star as it crosses the fold caustic of a foreground binary lens. During such an event, the planet's flux can be magnified by a factor of ~100 or more. The…
We investigate directly imaging exoplanets around eclipsing binaries, using the eclipse as a natural tool for dimming the binary and thus increasing the planet to star brightness contrast. At eclipse, the binary becomes point-like, making…