Related papers: Hyperbolic meteors: interstellar or generated loca…
After its formation, a young star spends some time traversing the molecular cloud complex in which it was born. It is therefore not unlikely that, well after the initial cloud collapse event which produced the star, it will encounter one or…
Satellite formation is a natural by-product of planet formation. With the discovery of nu- merous extrasolar planets, it is likely that moons of extrasolar planets (exomoons) will soon be discovered. Some of the most promising techniques…
Every second millions of small meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere producing dense plasmas. Radars easily detect these plasmas and researchers use this data to characterize both the meteoroids and the atmosphere. This paper develops a…
When extrasolar planets are observed to transit their parent stars, we are granted unprecedented access to their physical properties. It is only for transiting planets that we are permitted direct estimates of the planetary masses and…
We study stellar-halo formation using six Milky Way-mass galaxies in FIRE-2 cosmological zoom simulations. We find that $5-40\%$ of the outer ($50-300$ kpc) stellar halo in each system consists of $\textit{in-situ}$ stars that were born in…
Recent observations of asteroidal surfaces indicate the presence of materials that do not match the bulk lithology of the body. A possible explanation for the presence of these exogenous materials is that they are products of inter-asteroid…
Superfireballs are rare phenomena for which the reports are scarce and the estimation of their abundance has a huge margin of uncertainty. As a citizen science project we have gathered >500 reports from newspapers in the 1850-2000 period.…
Aims: We offer a new, simpler picture of the local interstellar medium, made of a single continuous cloud enveloping the Sun. This new outlook enables the description of a diffuse cloud from within and brings to light some unexpected…
We analyze infrasound signals from 71 bright meteors simultaneously detected by video to investigate the phenomenology and characteristics of meteor-generated near-field infrasound and shock production. A taxonomy for meteor generated…
Recent observations suggest that gamma ray bursts (GRBs) and their afterglows are produced in star formation regions in distant galaxies by highly relativistic jets that happen to point in our direction. Relativistic beaming collimates the…
The physical properties and kinematics of the partially ionized interstellar material near the Sun are typical of warm diffuse clouds in the solar vicinity. The interstellar magnetic field at the heliosphere and the kinematics of nearby…
Circumstellar debris disks are the extrasolar analogues of the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. They consist of comets and leftover planetesimals that continuously collide and produce circumstellar dust that can be observed as infrared…
Abundance anomalies observed in globular cluster stars indicate pollution with material processed by hydrogen burning. Two main sources have been suggested: asymptotic giant branch stars and massive stars rotating near the break-up limit.…
The first interstellar meteor larger than dust was detected by US government sensors in 2014, identified as an interstellar object candidate in 2019, and confirmed by the Department of Defense in 2022. Here, we describe an additional…
(Abridged) The formation of molecular clouds (MCs) from the diffuse interstellar gas appears to be a necessary step for star formation, as young stars invariably occur within them. However, the mechanisms controlling the formation of MCs…
Space weather refers to dynamic conditions on the Sun and in the space environment of the Earth, which are often driven by solar eruptions and their subsequent interplanetary disturbances. It has been unclear how an extreme space weather…
When the EPOXI spacecraft flew by Comet 103P/Hartley 2, it observed large particles floating around the comet nucleus. These particles are likely low-density, centimeter- to decimeter-sized clumps of ice and dust. While the origin of these…
Extrasolar debris disks are the dust disks found around nearby main sequence stars arising from the break-up of asteroids and comets orbiting the stars. Far-IR surveys (e.g., with Herschel) showed that ~20% of stars host detectable dust…
In recent years, evidence has been obtained that in the outer region of the Solar System (in the inner part of the Oort cloud), at a distance $\sim300-700$ AU from the Sun, there may be a captured planet or a primordial black hole. In this…
Hypervelocity stars (HVSs) are produced by the Hills mechanism when a stellar binary is disrupted by a supermassive black hole (SMBH). The HVS Survey detected 21 unbound B-type main-sequence stars in the Milky Way's outer halo that are…