Related papers: Beyond the New Horizon: The Future of Pluto
Since the dawn of civilization, humanity has grappled with the big questions of existence and creation. Modern cosmology seeks to answer some of these questions using a combination of mathematics and measurement. The questions people hope…
More than 635 000 positional observations (mostly radiotechnical) of planets and spacecraft (1961-2010), have been used for estimating possible changes of the gravitation constant, the solar mass, and semi-major axes of planets, as well as…
The recent discovery of the Sedna-like dwarf planet 2012 VP$_{\rm 113}$ by Trujillo and Sheppard has revamped the old-fashioned hypothesis that a still unseen trans-Plutonian object of planetary size, variously dubbed over the years as…
The New Horizons spacecraft, launched by NASA in 2006, will arrive in the Pluto-Charon system on July 14, 2015. There, it will spend a few hours imaging Pluto and its moons. It will then have a small amount of reserve propellant which will…
I review a number of the open questions about neutrino properties, critique recent hints of neutrino mass, and discuss one recently proposed neutrino mass matrix to illustrate the direction in which we may be headed. I also present one…
The present rate of the expansion of our Universe, the Hubble constant, can be predicted from the cosmological model using measurements of the early Universe, or more directly measured from the late Universe. But as these measurements…
The discovery of neutrino mass establishes the need for physics beyond the Standard Model. I summarize the status of two- and three-neutrino oscillation parameters from current solar, atmospheric, reactor and accelerator data. Future…
Simple theoretical calculations have suggested that small body impacts onto Pluto's newly discovered small satellites, Nix and Hydra, are capable of generating time-variable rings or dust sheets in the Pluto system. Using HST/ACS data…
One of the great scientific enigmas still unsolved, the existence of dark matter, is reviewed. Simple gravitational arguments imply that most of the mass in the Universe, at least 90%, is some (unknown) non-luminous matter. Some particle…
Since the discovery of a planet transiting its host star in the year 2000, thousands of additional exoplanets and exoplanet candidates have been detected, mostly by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Some of them are almost as small as the…
With the progress of detection techniques, the number of low-mass and small-size exoplanets is increasing rapidly. However their characteristics and formation mechanisms are not yet fully understood. The metallicity of the host star is a…
Since the first microlensing planet discovery in 2003, more than 200 planets have been detected with gravitational microlensing, in addition to several free-floating planet and black hole candidates. In this chapter the microlensing theory…
We analytically compute the effects that a mass variation rate \dot M/M of a pulsar may have on the changes \Delta\tau in the times of arrival of its pulses due to test particle companions, and on their orbital dynamics. We apply our…
Correlation functions and related statistics have been favorite measures of the distributions of extragalactic objects ever since people started analyzing the clustering of the galaxies in the 1930s. I review the evolving reasons for this…
A group of newly observed extreme trans-Neptunian objects exhibit unexpected orbital confinement, characterized by the alignment of orbital angular momentum vectors and apsidal lines. It is proposed that an undiscovered giant planet, named…
The recent astronomical observations indicate that the expanding universe is homogeneous, isotropic and asymptotically flat. The Euclidean geometry of the universe enables to determine the total gravitational and kinetic energy of the…
Neutrino physics is nowadays receiving more and more attention as a possible source of information for the long--standing investigation of new physics beyond the Standard Model. This is also supported by the recent change of perspectives in…
Major progresses have been made this last year towards a better knowledge of the invisible mass. Michel Spiro will talk in details about the micro-lensing experiments and their promising results; the ROSAT satellite has provided extended…
How good is our universe at making habitable planets? The answer to this depends on which factors are important for life: Does a planet need to be Earth mass? Does it need to be inside the temperate zone? are systems with hot Jupiters…
Of all planet-finding techniques, microlensing is potentially the most sensitive to Earth-mass planets. However, microlensing lightcurves generically yield only the planet-star mass ratio: the mass itself is uncertain to a factor of a few.…