Related papers: Detectability of Oort cloud objects using Kepler
The results of a search for sub-km Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) with the method of serendipitous stellar occultations are reported. Photometric time series were obtained on the 1.8m telescope at the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO) in…
The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) will detect objects in the Kuiper Belt, by measuring the rate of occultations of stars by these objects, using an array of three to four 50cm wide-field robotic telescopes. Thousands of stars…
Context: Observation of star occultations is a powerful tool to determine shapes and sizes of asteroids. This is key information necessary for studying the evolution of the asteroid belt and to calibrate indirect methods of size…
Occultations provide indirect sensitivity to the number density of small Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) too faint to directly detect telescopically. We present results from the Caltech HI-speed Multicolor camERA (CHIMERA) survey with the…
Long-period comets observed in our solar system are believed to originate from the Oort cloud, which is estimated to extend from roughly a few thousand to $10^5$ AU from the Sun. Despite many theoretical arguments for its existence, no…
We propose a Roman Space Telescope survey to investigate fundamental properties of the distant solar system in the region of the Kuiper Belt where object characteristics and the size distribution are inaccessible from any other telescope.…
The Oort cloud is usually thought of as a collection of icy comets inhabiting the outer reaches of the Solar system, but this picture is incomplete. We use simulations of the formation of the Oort cloud to show that ~4% of the small bodies…
We conducted a search for occultations of bright stars by Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) to estimate the density of sub-km KBOs in the sky. We report here the first results of this occultation survey of the outer solar system conducted in June…
The Oort cloud, a collection of icy bodies orbiting the sun at roughly $10^{3}$ AU to $10^{5}$ AU, is believed to be the source of the long-period comets observed in the inner solar system. Although its existence was predicted nearly 70…
Occultations, the covering up of one celestial body by another celestial body, have been used in astronomy for millennia to learn about the sun and moon. Since 2018, VERITAS has implemented a program to detect predicted asteroid…
Measuring the size distribution of small (km-scale) KBOs can help constrain models of Solar System formation and planetary migration. Such small, distant bodies are hard to detect with current or planned telescopes, but can be identified as…
Context: Occultations of stars by asteroids are an efficient method to study the properties of minor bodies, and can be exploited as tools to derive very precise asteroid astrometry relative to the target star. With the availability of…
This paper considers the dynamics of scattering of planetesimals or planetary embryos by a planet on a circumstellar orbit. We classify six regions in the planet's mass versus semimajor axis parameter space according to the dominant outcome…
The population of the Kuiper Belt within 50 AU of the Sun has likely been severely depleted by gravitational perturbations from the giant planets, particularly Neptune. The density of Kuiper Belt objects is expected to be two orders of…
Imaging Atmosphere Cherenkov Telescopes (IACT) are arrays of very large optical telescopes that are well-suited for rapid photometry of bright sources. I investigate their potential in observing stellar occultations by small objects in the…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…
Asteroseismology of solar-type stars has an important part to play in the exoplanet program of the NASA Kepler Mission. Precise and accurate inferences on the stellar properties that are made possible by the seismic data allow very tight…
The longitudes of perihelia and orbital poles of the solar system's dozen or so most remote detected objects are clustered in a manner inconsistent with that of a random sample of uniformly distributed orbits. While small number statistics…
Distant objects in the solar system are crucial to better understand the history and evolution of its outskirts. The stellar occultation technique allows the determination of their sizes and shapes with kilometric accuracy, a detailed…
Planetary systems can act as sensitive gravitational detectors for dark matter. We investigate the gravitational scattering of Oort cloud objects by primordial black holes (PBHs) as a potential component of the Galactic dark matter halo.…