Related papers: Dark Matter as a Trigger for Periodic Comet Impact…
Geometrically thick disks may form after tidal disruption events, and rapid accretion may lead to short flares followed by long-term, lower-level emission. Using a novel accretion disk code which relies primarily on global conservation laws…
Dark matter has been introduced to explain many independent gravitational effects at different astronomical scales, in galaxies, groups of galaxies, clusters, superclusters and even across the full horizon. This review describes the…
Context: Since circumstellar dust in debris disks is short-lived, dust-replenishing requires the presence of a reservoir of planetesimals. These planetesimals in the parent belt of debris disks orbit their host star and continuously supply…
The planet candidate Fomalhaut b is bright in optical light but undetected in longer wavelengths, requiring a large, reflective dust cloud. The most recent observations find an extremely eccentric orbit (e ~ 0.8), indicating that Fomalhaut…
Tentative evidence of a 3.5 keV X-ray line has been found in the stacked spectra of galaxy clusters, individual clusters, the Andromeda galaxy and the galactic center, leading to speculation that it could be due to decays of metastable dark…
Gravitational potential fluctuations driven by bursty star formation can kinematically 'heat up' dark matter at the centres of dwarf galaxies. A key prediction of such models is that, at a fixed dark matter halo mass, dwarfs with a higher…
Dark stars are compact massive objects, described by Einstein gravitational field equations with matter. The type we consider possesses no event horizon, instead, there is a deep gravitational well with a very strong redshift factor.…
The giant planet occurrence rate rises with orbital period out to at least $\sim$300 days. Large-scale planetary migration through the disk has long been suspected to be the physical origin of this feature, as the timescale of standard Type…
We analyze stellar tidal disruption events as a possible observational signature of gravitational wave induced recoil of supermassive black holes. As a black hole wanders through its galaxy, it will tidally disrupt bound and unbound stars…
A massive ``dark companion'' -- such as an intermediate-mass black hole or other compact dark object -- orbiting the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center can dynamically reshape the surrounding dark-matter spike. Through…
We have investigated the effect of stellar encounters on the formation and disruption of the Oort cloud using the classical impulse approximation. We calculate the evolution of a planetesimal disk into a spherical Oort cloud due to the…
Two recent papers claimed to have found a periodic variation of the galactic cosmic ray (CR) flux over the last 1-2 Gyr, using the CR exposure ages of iron meteorites. This was attributed to higher CR flux during the passage of the Earth…
If a subdominant component of dark matter (DM) interacts via long-range dark force carriers it may cool and collapse to form complex structures within the Milky Way galaxy, such as a rotating dark disk. This scenario was proposed recently…
In 2012, we applied a three-dimensional formulation to kinematic measurements of the Galactic thick disk and derived a surprisingly low dark matter density at the solar position. This result was challenged by Bovy & Tremaine (2012, ApJ,…
We employ numerical simulations and simple analytical estimates to argue that dark matter substructures orbiting in the inner regions of the Galaxy can be efficiently destroyed by disk shocking, a dynamical process known to affect globular…
It has been suggested ``that DM particles are strongly interacting composite macroscopically large objects ... made of well known light quarks (or ... antiquarks)." In doing so it is argued that these compact composite objects (CCOs) are…
The effect of some possible non standard WIMP velocity distributions, like the Debris Flows recently proposed, on the direct dark matter detection rates is investigated. We find that such distributions may be deciphered from the data,…
From astronomical observations, we know that dark matter exists, makes up 23% of the mass budget of the Universe, clusters strongly to form the load-bearing frame of structure for galaxy formation, and hardly interacts with ordinary matter…
We present numerical relativity results of tidal disruptions of white dwarfs from ultra-close encounters with a spinning, intermediate mass black hole. These encounters require a full general relativistic treatment of gravity. We show that…
We have identified iridium in an ~5 m-thick section of pelagic sediment cored in the deep sea floor at Site 886C, in addition to a distinct spike in iridium at the K-Pg boundary related to the Chicxulub asteroid impact. We distinguish the…