Related papers: Recurrent Perihelion Activity in (3200) Phaethon
We study the prospects for extracting detailed statistical properties of the neutral Hydrogen distribution during the era of reionization using the brightness temperature fluctuations from redshifted 21 cm line emission. Detection of this…
In planetary science, surface roughness is regarded to be a measure of surface irregularity at small spatial scales, and causes the thermal-infrared beaming effect (i.e. re-radiation of absorbed sunlight back towards to the Sun). Typically,…
The under-abundance of asteroids on orbits with small perihelion distances suggests that thermally-driven disruption may be an important process in the removal of rocky bodies in the Solar System. Here we report our study of how the debris…
Centaurs are small Solar System objects on chaotic orbits in the giant planet region, forming an evolutionary continuum with the Kuiper belt objects and Jupiter-family comets. Some Centaurs are known to exhibit cometary activity, though…
Decades after the beginning of its FU Orionis-type outburst, V346 Nor unexpectedly underwent a fading event of $\Delta{}K$ = 4.6 mag around 2010. We obtained near-infrared observations and re-analysed data from the VISTA/VVV survey to…
An unexpected intense outburst of the Draconid meteor shower was detected by the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR) on October 8, 2012. The peak flux occurred at ~16:40 UT on October 8 with a maximum of 2.4 +/- 0.3 hr-1 km-2 (appropriate to…
Extending the investigation of the presumed primordial comet as part of continuing work on a new model of the Kreutz sungrazer system, I confront a previously derived set of orbital elements with Aristotle's remarks in his Meteorologica to…
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has been approaching its 2025 October 29 perihelion while opposite the Sun from Earth, hindering ground-based optical observations over the preceding month. However, this geometry placed the comet within the…
The observed near-Earth asteroid population contains very few objects with small perihelion distances, say, q<=0.2 au. NEAs that currently have orbits with larger q might be hiding a past evolution during which they have approached closer…
We present results from a multi-chord Pluto stellar occultation observed on 29 June 2015 from New Zealand and Australia. This occurred only two weeks before the NASA New Horizons flyby of the Pluto system and serves as a useful comparison…
Gaia21bty, a pre-main sequence star that previously had shown aperiodic dips in its light curve, underwent a considerable $\Delta G\approx2.9$ mag brightening that occurred over a few months between 2020 October - 2021 February. The Gaia…
We present observations from X-ray to mid-infrared wavelengths of the most energetic non-quasar transient ever observed, AT2021lwx. Our data show a single optical brightening by a factor $>100$ to a luminosity of $7\times10^{45}$ erg…
A trending astronomical phenomenon to study is the variation in brightness of asteroids, caused by its rotation on its own axis, non-spherical shapes, changes of albedo along its surface and its position relative to the sun. The latter…
We present the results of observations of asteroid (248370) QN$_{173}$ obtained during July 2021 - January 2022 with three telescopes. Our analysis revealed the presence of the dust tail for about half of a year. The direct images of the…
We have obtained extensive photometric observations of the polluted white dwarf WD 1145+017 which has been reported to be transited by at least one, and perhaps several, large asteroids (or, planetesimals) with dust emission. We have…
The Desert Fireball Network observed a significant outburst of fireballs belonging to the Southern Taurid Complex of meteor showers between October 27 and November 17, 2015. At the same time, the Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance…
Image photometry reveals that the F ring is approximately twice as bright during the Cassini tour as it was during the Voyager flybys of 1980 and 1981. It is also three times as wide and has a higher integrated optical depth. We have…
Cosmology experiments at mm-wavelengths can detect Planet Nine if it is the size of Neptune, has an effective temperature of 40 K, and is 700 AU from the Sun. It would appear as a ~30 mJy source at 1 mm with an annual parallax of ~5 arcmin.…
The Rosetta space probe accompanied comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for more than two years, obtaining an unprecedented amount of unique data of the comet nucleus and inner coma. This work focuses identifying the source regions of faint…
We analyze here two very bright fireballs produced by the ablation in the atmosphere of two large meteoroids in 2009 and 2010. These slow-moving and deep-penetrating events were observed over Spain in the framework of our Spanish Fireball…