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White dwarfs are one of the few types of stellar objects for which we know almost nothing about the possible existence of companion planets. Recent evidence for metal contaminated atmospheres, circumstellar debris disks and transiting…
In the past decade, the number of known binary near-Earth asteroids has more than quadrupled and the number of known large main belt asteroids with satellites has doubled. Half a dozen triple asteroids have been discovered, and the…
Stellar activity is a potential important limitation to the detection of low mass extrasolar planets with indirect methods (RV, photometry, astrometry). In previous papers, using the Sun as a proxy, we investigated the impact of stellar…
Einstein Telescope (ET) is a 3rd generation gravitational-wave (GW) detector that is currently undergoing a design study. ET can detect millions of compact binary mergers up to redshifts 2-8. A small fraction of mergers might be observed in…
The quest for Earth-like, extrasolar planets (exoplanets), especially those located inside the habitable zone of their host stars, requires techniques sensitive enough to detect the faint signals produced by those planets. The radial…
The phenomenon of microlensing has successfully been used to detect extrasolar planets. By observing characteristic, rare deviations in the gravitational microlensing light curve one can discover that a lens is a star--planet system. In…
Despite the large amount of high quality data generated in recent space encounters with asteroids, the majority of our knowledge about these objects comes from ground based observations. Asteroids travelling in orbits that are potentially…
Using the MIPS instrument on the Spitzer telescope, we have searched for infrared excesses around a sample of 82 stars, mostly F, G, and K main-sequence field stars, along with a small number of nearby M stars. These stars were selected for…
We investigate the prospects for detecting dust from two body collisions during the late stages of planet formation at 1-150 AU. We develop an analytic model to describe the formation of a dusty cloud of debris and use numerical coagulation…
It is often claimed that asteroids' sharing of orbits is the reason they were re-classified from planets to non-planets. A critical review of the literature from the 19th Century to the present shows this is factually incorrect. The…
The amount of debris in orbit has increased significantly over the years. With the recent growth of interest in space exploration, conjunction assessment has become a central issue. One important metric to evaluate conjunction risk is the…
Planetary companions to the source stars of a caustic-crossing binary microlensing events can be detected via the deviation from the parent light curves created when the caustic magnifies the star light reflecting off the atmosphere or…
In its 16 years of scientific measurements, the Spitzer Space Telescope performed a number of ground-breaking infrared measurements of Solar System objects. In this second of two papers, we describe results from Spitzer observations of…
Most extrasolar planets currently known were discovered by means of an indirect method that measures the stellar wobble caused by the planet. We previously studied a triple system composed of a star and a nearby binary on circular coplanar…
In this talk I discuss the reach of traditional methods of elementary particle physics in five broad experimental areas. For each of these areas I inquire how that reach is, or might be, extended by experimental and observational…
An extrasolar planet can be detected via microlensing from the perturbation it makes in the smooth lensing light curve of the primary. In addition to the conventional photometric microlensing, astrometric observation of the center-of-light…
The radial velocity signature of stellar noise is small, around the meter-per-second, but already too much for the detection of Earth mass planets in habitable zones. In this paper, we address the important role played by observational…
Microlensing is proving to be one of the best techniques to detect distant, low-mass planets around the most common stars in the Galaxy. In principle, Earth's microlensing signal could offer the chance for other technological civilisations…
The number of binary asteroids in the near-Earth region might be significantly higher than expected. While Bottke and Melosh (1996) suggested that about 15% of the NEAs are binaries, as indicated from the frequency of double craters, and…
The population of artificial satellites and space debris orbiting the Earth imposes non-negligible constraints on both space operations and ground-based optical and radio astronomy. The ongoing deployment of several satellite…