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Conventional planet formation theories predict a paucity of massive planets around small stars, especially very low-mass ($0.1 - 0.3 \ M_{\odot}$) mid-to-late M dwarfs. Such tiny stars are expected to form planets of terrestrial sizes, but…
Enhancement of omega and antiomega baryon production in Pb+Pb collisions at a c.m. energy of 17 A GeV can be explained by the formation of many small disoriented chiral condensate regions. This explanation implies that neutral and charged…
Triton is a unique moon in our Solar System, being the only large moon to orbit on a retrograde and highly inclined orbit. As a result, it is thought that it did not form around Neptune, but rather was captured from heliocentric orbit. The…
The Neptunian satellite system is unusual, comprising Triton, a large ($\sim2700$ km) moon on a close-in, circular, yet retrograde orbit, flanked by Nereid, the largest irregular satellite ($\sim$300 km) on a highly eccentric orbit. Capture…
We present observations of the formation process of a small-scale filament on the quiet Sun during 5-6 February 2016 and investigate its formation cause. Initially, a small dipole emerged and its associated arch filament system was found to…
The Pluto-Charon binary system is the best-studied representative of the binary Kuiper-belt population. Its origins are vital to understanding the formation of other Kupier-belt objects (KBO) and binaries, and the evolution of the outer…
NASA's Kepler mission revealed that $\sim 30\%$ of Solar-type stars harbor planets with sizes between that of Earth and Neptune on nearly circular and co-planar orbits with periods less than 100 days. Such short-period compact systems are…
Approximately half of the planets discovered by NASA's Kepler mission are in systems where just a single planet transits its host star, and the remaining planets are observed to be in multi-planet systems. Recent analyses have reported a…
Planetary migration is the process by which a forming planet undergoes a drift of its semi-major axis caused by the tidal interaction with its parent protoplanetary disc. One of the key quantities to assess the migration of embedded planets…
Most of super-Earths detected by the radial velocity (RV) method have significantly smaller eccentricities than the eccentricities corresponding to velocity dispersion equal to their surface escape velocity ("escape eccentricities"). If…
We suggest that low-mass compact objects (hadron stars, quark stars) with $M<1 M_{\odot}$ can appear only due to fragmentation of rapidly rotating proto-neutron stars. Such low-mass stars receive large kicks due to an explosion of a lighter…
The origin of the terrestrial atmosphere is one of the most puzzling enigmas in the planetary sciences. It is suggested here that two sources contributed to its formation, fractionated nebular gases and accreted cometary volatiles. During…
Data from the Galileo mission to Jupiter and the Apollo mission to the Moon show isotopically distinct types of xenon in Jupiter and in the Sun and evidence of a mass separation process that selectively moves lighter elements and the…
Dense and narrow rings have been discovered recently around the small Centaur object Chariklo and the dwarf planet Haumea, while being suspected around the Centaur Chiron. They are the first rings observed in the Solar System elsewhere than…
We show that photoevaporation of small gaseous exoplanets ("mini-Neptunes") in the habitable zones of M dwarfs can remove several Earth masses of hydrogen and helium from these planets and transform them into potentially habitable worlds.…
Context: The Solar System giant planets harbour a wide variety of moons. Moons around exoplanets are plausibly similarly abundant, even though most of them are likely too small to be easily detectable with modern instruments. Moons are…
Since 2013, dense and narrow rings are known around the small Centaur object Chariklo and the dwarf planet Haumea. Dense material has also been detected around the Centaur Chiron, although its nature is debated. This is the first time ever…
(Abridged) Planets are surrounded by fractal surfaces (traditionally called Hill spheres), separating the inner zones of long-term stable orbital motion of their satellites from the outer space where the gravitational pull from the Sun…
Several families of irregular moons orbit the giant planets. These moons are thought to have been captured into planetocentric orbits after straying into a region in which the planet's gravitation dominates solar perturbations (the Hill…
We study the impactor flux and cratering on Pluto and Charon due to the collisional evolution of Plutinos. Plutinos are those trans-Neptunian objects located at 39.5 AU, in the 3:2 mean motion resonance with Neptune. To do this, we develop…