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Via joint analysis of a calibrated telescopic survey, which found scattering Kuiper Belt objects, and models of their expected orbital distribution, we measure the form of the scattering object's size distribution. Ruling out a single…
The planetary nebula (PN) NGC 6778 harbors a binary central star with a short orbital period and displays two systems of fast collimated outflows. In order to assess the influence of the evolution through a common-envelope phase of the…
We present here the first observationally based determination of the rate of occurrence of circumbinary planets. This is derived from the publicly available Kepler data, using an automated search algorithm and debiasing process to produce…
We used N-body simulations to model the 4.5 Gyr orbital evolution of the early Kuiper Belt, incorporating a massive protoplanetary disk, the four giant planets, and 1500 primordial Pluto-class bodies ("Plutos") that drove Neptune's grainy…
Planets in extrasolar systems tend to interact such that their orbits lie near a boundary between apsidal libration and circulation, a "separatrix", with one eccentricity periodically reaching near-zero. One explanation, applied to the…
Chiang et al. 2006, hereafter C06 have recently proposed that the observed structure of the Kuiper belt could be the result of a dynamical instability of a system of ~5 primordial ice giant planets in the outer Solar System. According to…
Wide, fragile binary stellar systems are found in the galactic field, and have recently been noted in the outskirts of expanding star clusters in numerical simulations. Energetically soft, with semi-major axes exceeding the initial size of…
Surveys of the binary populations in the solar neighbourhood have shown that the periods of G- and M-type stars are log-normally distributed. However, observations of young binary populations suggest a log-uniform distribution. Clearly some…
A current issue in the study of planetary nebulae with close binary central stars is the extent to which the binaries affect the shaping of the nebulae. Recent studies have begun to show a high coincidence rate between nebulae with…
A binary in which a slightly evolved star starts mass transfer to a neutron star can evolve towards ultra-short orbital periods under the influence of magnetic braking. This is called magnetic capture. We investigate in detail for which…
Close-binary central stars of planetary nebulae offer a unique tool with which to study the critical and yet poorly understood common-envelope phase of binary stellar evolution. Furthermore, as the nebula itself is thought to comprise the…
Hostile tidal forces may inhibit the formation of Jovian planets in binaries with semimajor axes of $\la$$50\au$, binaries that might be called ``close'' in this context. As an alternative to in situ planet formation, a binary can acquire a…
Circumbinary planetary systems recently discovered by Kepler represent an important testbed for planet formation theories. Planetesimal growth in disks around binaries has been expected to be inhibited interior to ~10 AU by secular…
We employ an efficient numerical approach to simulate a stationary distribution of test objects, which results from their gravitational scattering on the four giant planets, with accounting for effects of mean motion resonances. Using the…
The Kepler satellite has discovered a number of transiting planets around close binary stars. These circumbinary systems have highly aligned planetary and binary orbits. In this paper, we explore how the mutual inclination between the…
Significant numbers of free-floating planetary-mass objects have been discovered in nearby star-forming regions by the James Webb Space Telescope, including a substantial number (42) of Jupiter Mass Binary Objects ('JuMBOs') in the Orion…
(Abridged) In planetary systems with two or more giant planets, dynamical instabilities can lead to collisions or ejections through strong planet--planet scattering. Previous studies for simple initial configurations with two equal-mass…
The environment near super massive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic nuclei contain a large number of stars and compact objects. A fraction of these are likely to be members of binaries. Here we discuss the binary population of stellar black…
Chaotic dynamics are expected during and after planet formation, and a leading mechanism to explain large eccentricities of gas giant exoplanets is planet-planet gravitational scattering. The same scattering has been invoked to explain…
Recent discoveries of circumbinary planets in Kepler data show that there is a viable channel of planet formation around binary main sequence stars. Motivated by these discoveries, we have investigated the caustic structures and…