Related papers: Detectability of Oort cloud objects using Kepler
The Kepler Mission recently identified 997 systems hosting candidate extrasolar planets, many of which are super-Earths. Realizing these planetary systems are candidates to host extrasolar asteroid belts, we use mid-infrared data from the…
Discovering and characterizing exoplanets at the outer edge of the transit method's sensitivity has proven challenging owing to geometric biases and the practical difficulties associated with acquiring long observational baselines.…
The Kepler spacecraft, whose single instrument was a 0.95 m diameter wide-field telescope, operated in a heliocentric orbit for nearly a decade, returning a wealth of data that have revolutionized exoplanet science. Kepler data have been…
In order to detect and characterise cold extended circumstellar dust originating from collisions of planetesimal bodies in disks, belts, or rings at Kuiper-Belt distances (30-50 AU or beyond) sensitive submillimetre observations are…
Using a fully autonomous spacecraft - Bering - we propose to detect and study sub-km asteroids from an orbit within the asteroid Main Belt. The main purpose of the proposed Bering mission is to detect a statistically significant sample of…
About 2500 square degrees of sky south of declination -25 degrees and/or near the galactic plane were surveyed for bright outer solar system objects. This survey is one of the first large scale southern sky and galactic plane surveys to…
This work investigates the use of stellar occultation measurements to enhance the orbit determination performance of the Lunar Meteoroid Impact Observer (LUMIO) mission, operating from a quasi-Halo orbit around the Earth-Moon L2 point.…
To study the population properties of small, remote objects beyond Neptune's orbit in the outer solar system, of kilometer size or smaller, serendipitous occultation search is so far the only way. For hectometer-sized Trans-Neptunian…
The solar system's Oort cloud can be perturbed by the Galactic tide and by individual passing stars. These perturbations can inject Oort cloud objects into the inner parts of the solar system, where they may be observed as the long-period…
We initiated the Robo-AO Kepler Planetary Candidate Survey in 2012 to observe each Kepler exoplanet candidate host star with high-angular-resolution visible-light laser-adaptive-optics imaging. Our goal is to find nearby stars lying in…
We present the results of a search for potential transit signals in the first three quarters of photometry data acquired by the Kepler Mission. The targets of the search include 151,722 stars which were observed over the full interval and…
We study the effects of an encounter between a wandering cosmic object (WCO) of 0.1 solar mass and some Kuiperian Objects (KO). First, we let the WCO cross the out-skirt of ou Kuiper belt. Such encounters can produce two types of solar…
Two planetary mass objects in the far outer Solar System --- collectively referred to here as Planet X --- have recently been hypothesized to explain the orbital distribution of distant Kuiper Belt Objects. Neither planet is thought to be…
The formation of the largest objects in the Kuiper belt, with measured densities of ~1.5 g cm-3 and higher, from the coagulation of small bodies, with measured densities below 1 g cm-3 is difficult to explain without invoking significant…
Our understanding of extra-solar planet systems is highly driven by advances in observations in the past decade. Thanks to high precision spectrograph, we are able to reveal unseen companions to stars with the radial velocity method. High…
New discoveries of transiting extrasolar planets are reported weekly. Ground based surveys as well as space borne observatories like CoRoT and Kepler are responsible for filling the statistical voids of planets on distant stellar systems. I…
The CoRoT and Kepler satellites were the first space platforms designed to perform high-precision photometry for a large number of stars. Multiple systems display a wide variety of photometric variability, making them natural benefactors of…
A group of newly observed extreme trans-Neptunian objects exhibit unexpected orbital confinement, characterized by the alignment of orbital angular momentum vectors and apsidal lines. It is proposed that an undiscovered giant planet, named…
We determine the orbital eccentricities of individual small Kepler planets, through a combination of asteroseismology and transit light-curve analysis. We are able to constrain the eccentricities of 51 systems with a single transiting…
We use an extensive suite of numerical simulations to constrain the mass and orbit of Planet Nine, the recently proposed perturber in a distant eccentric orbit in the outer solar system. We compare our simulations to the observed population…