Related papers: Is the Missing Ultra-Red Material Colorless Ice?
Ever since the very first photometric studies of Centaurs and Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) their visible color distribution has been controversial. That controversy gave rise to a prolific debate on the origin of the surface colors of these…
Dynamically excited objects within the Kuiper belt show a bimodal distribution in their surface colors, and these differing surface colors may be a tracer of where these objects formed. In this work we explore radial color distributions in…
The distant ice giants of the Solar System, Uranus and Neptune, have only been visited by one space mission, Voyager 2. The current knowledge on their composition remains very limited despite some recent advances. A better characterization…
Superfluidity or superconductivity with mismatched Fermi momenta appears in many systems such as charge neutral dense quark matter, asymmetric nuclear matter, and in imbalanced cold atomic gases. The mismatch plays the role of breaking the…
We estimate the maximal deformation that can be sustained by a rotating neutron star with a crystalline colour superconducting quark core. Our results suggest that current gravitational-wave data from LIGO have already reached the level…
IRTF/SpeX observations of Pluto's near-infrared reflectance spectrum during 2013 show vibrational absorption features of CO and N$_2$ ices at 1.58 and 2.15 {\mu}m, respectively, that are weaker than had been observed during the preceding…
Observations of thermal radiation from neutron stars allow one to measure the surface temperatures and confront them with cooling scenarios. Detection of gravitationally redshifted spectral lines can yield the mass-to-radius ratio. In the…
Neutron stars and stellar-mass black holes are the remnants of massive stars, which ended their lives in supernova explosions. These exotic objects can only be studied in relatively rare cases. If they are interacting with close companions…
[Abridged] A key hypothesis in the field of exoplanet atmospheres is the trend of atmospheric thermal structure with planetary equilibrium temperature. We explore this trend and report here the first statistical detection of a transition in…
We present calculations of thermal evolution of Hot Jupiters with various masses and effective temperatures under Ohmic dissipation. The resulting evolutionary sequences show a clear tendency towards inflated radii for effective…
To date, at least three comets -- 2I/Borisov, C/2016 R2 (PanSTARRS), and C/2009 P1 (Garradd) -- have been observed to have unusually high CO concentrations compared to water. We attempt to explain these observations by modeling the effect…
Recent observations show that the thermal X-ray spectra of many isolated neutron stars are featureless and in some cases (e.g., RX J1856.5-3754) well fit by a blackbody. Such a perfect blackbody spectrum is puzzling since radiative…
Kuiper belt objects, such as Arrokoth, the probable progenitors of short-period comets, formed and evolved at large heliocentric distances, where the ambient temperatures appear to be sufficiently low for preserving volatile ices. By…
We present optical and near-infrared observations with Keck of the binary millisecond pulsar PSR J0751+1807. We detect a faint, red object - with R=25.08+-0.07, B-R=2.5+-0.3, and R-I=0.90+-0.10 - at the celestial position of the pulsar and…
Through a simple physical argument we show that the slant optical depth through the atmosphere of a "hot Jupiter" planet is 35-90 times greater than the normal optical depth. This not unexpected result has direct consequences for the method…
We examine the thermal evolution of a sequence of compact objects containing low-mass hadronic and high-mass quark-hadronic stars constructed from a microscopically motivated equation of state. The dependence of the cooling tracks in the…
An anomalous transient in the early Hubble-type (S0) galaxy Messier 85 (M85) in the Virgo cluster was discovered by Kulkarni et al. (2007) on 7 January 2006 that had very low luminosity (peak absolute R-band magnitude MR of about -12) that…
Molecules present in exoplanetary atmospheres are expected to strongly influence the atmospheric radiation balance, trace dynamical and chemical processes, and indicate the presence of disequilibrium effects. Since molecules have the…
We examine the spectra and infrared colors of the cool methane-dominated atmospheres at Teff < 1400 K expected for young gas giant planets. We couple these spectral calculations to an updated version of the Marley et al. (2007) giant planet…
If X-rays observed from any extragalactic radio jets are due to inverse Compton scattering on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, then such a source will be detectable with the same surface brightness anywhere in the more…