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The proposed field-of-view of the Kepler mission is at an ecliptic latitude of ~55 degrees, where the surface density of scattered Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) is a few percent that in the ecliptic plane. The rate of occultations of Kepler…
Most current astronomical adaptive optics (AO) systems rely on the availability of a bright star to measure the distortion of the incoming wavefront. Replacing the guide star with an artificial laser beacon alleviates this dependency on…
Kuiper belt objects smaller than a few kilometers are difficult to observe directly. They can be detected when they randomly occult a background star. Close to the ecliptic plane, each star is occulted once every tens of thousands of hours,…
(Abridged) We present the first detections of the mean flux of the optical extragalactic background light (EBL) at 3000, 5500, and 8000A. Diffuse foreground flux at these wavelengths comes from terrestrial airglow, dust-scattered sunlight…
We present a comprehensive analysis of planetary phase variations, including possible planetary light offsets, using eighteen quarters of data from the Kepler space telescope. After correcting for systematics, we found fourteen systems with…
Strong gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of the distribution of matter on sub-kpc scales. It can be used to test the existence of completely dark subhalos surrounding galaxies, as predicted by the standard cold dark matter model, or…
The phase or orbital light curves of extrasolar terrestrial planets in reflected or emitted light will contain information about their atmospheres and surfaces complementary to data obtained by other techniques such as spectrosopy. We show…
The limiting magnitude of the HST data set used by Cochran et al. (1995) to detect small objects in the Kuiper belt is reevaluated, and the methods used are described in detail. It is shown, by implanting artificial objects in the original…
We describe the instrumentation and detection software and characterize the detection efficiency of an automated, all-sky, southern-hemisphere search for Kuiper Belt objects brighter than R mag 21.4. The search relies on Yale University's…
An unusual orbital element clustering of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) has been observed. The most promising dynamic solution is the presence of a giant planet in the outer Solar system, Planet Nine. However, due to its extreme distance,…
Though efforts to detect them have been made with a variety of methods, no technique can claim a successful, confirmed detection of a moon outside the Solar System yet. Moon detection methods are restricted in capability to detecting moons…
The previous decade saw the discovery of the first four known interstellar objects due to advances in astronomical viewing equipment. Future sky surveys with greater sensitivity will allow for more frequent detections of such objects,…
Direct photometric measurements of the cosmic optical background (COB) provide an important point of comparison to both other measurement methodologies and models of cosmic structure formation, and permit a cosmic consistency test with the…
Making an inventory of the Solar System is one of the four pillars that the requirements for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) are built upon. The choice between same-filter nightly pairs or different-filter nightly pairs in the…
The nearly continuous light curves with micromagnitude precision provided by the space mission Kepler are revolutionising our view of pulsating stars. They have revealed a vast sea of low-amplitude pulsation modes that were undetectable…
Research into light curves from stars (temporal variation of brightness) has completely changed how exoplanets are discovered or characterised. This study including star light curves from the Kepler dataset as a way to discover exoplanets…
The occultation of background stars by foreground Solar system objects, such as planets and asteroids, has been widely used as an observational probe to study physical properties associated with the foreground sample. Similarly, the…
In multi-spectral images made by Earth observation satellites that use push-broom scanning, such as those operated by Planet Labs Corp., moving objects can be identified by the appearance of the object at a different locations in each…
In absence of a lens to form an image, incoherent or partially coherent light scattering off an obstructive or reflective object forms a broad intensity distribution in the far field with only feeble spatial features. We show here that…
Old, digitized astronomical images taken before the human spacefaring age offer a unique view of the sky devoid of known artificial satellites. In this paper, we have carried out the first optical searches ever for non-terrestrial artifacts…