Related papers: Realistic Detectability of Close Interstellar Come…

Radio wavelength astrometry of stars and other objects has a long and productive history. The use of that technique to determine whether stars have planets around them would cover a nearly unique part of the parameter space for detection of…

The most complete catalogue of nearby stars (Gliese and Jarheiss, 1991) has been used to search for the stars whose photospheric thermal emission can be detected by the future millimeter array ALMA. We found that 446 nearby stars with…

Given the tendency of planets to form in multiples, and the observational evidence in support of the existence of potential planet-hosting stars in binaries or clusters, it is expected that extrasolar terrestrial planes are more likely to…

Two planetary mass objects in the far outer Solar System --- collectively referred to here as Planet X --- have recently been hypothesized to explain the orbital distribution of distant Kuiper Belt Objects. Neither planet is thought to be…

The study of the planet-debris disk connection can shed light on the formation and evolution of planetary systems, and may help predict the presence of planets around stars with certain disk characteristics. In preliminary analyses of the…

High contrast imaging searches for exoplanets have been conducted on 2.4-10 m telescopes, typically at H band (1.6 microns) and used exposure times of ~1 hr to search for planets with semi-major axes of > ~10 AU. We are beginning to plan…

Most stars form in dense stellar environments, where frequent close encounters can strongly perturb and reshape the early architecture of planetary systems. The solar system, with its rich population of distant comets, provides a natural…

Stellar flybys in star clusters are suspected to affect the orbital architecture of planetary systems causing eccentricity excitation and orbital misalignment between the planet orbit and the equatorial plane of the star. We explore whether…

Long range observations in the field of astronomy have opened up our understanding of the Solar System, the Galaxy and the wider Universe. In this paper we discuss the idea of direct in-situ reconnaissance of nearby stellar systems, using…

Hot Jupiters, giant extrasolar planets with orbital periods shorter than ~10 days, have long been thought to form at large radial distances, only to subsequently experience long-range inward migration. Here, we propose that in contrast with…

We present 230 realizations of a numerical model of planet formation in systems without gas giants. These represent a scenario in which protoplanets grow in a region of a circumstellar disk where water ice condenses (the "ice line''), but…

We show that if comets (or any small icy planetesimals such as Kuiper belt objects) are composed of pebble piles, their internal radiogenic as well as geochemical heating results in considerably different evolutionary outcomes compared to…

A large number of direct imaging surveys for exoplanets have been performed in recent years, yielding the first directly imaged planets and providing constraints on the prevalence and distribution of wide planetary systems. However, like…

The solar system's Oort cloud can be perturbed by the Galactic tide and by individual passing stars. These perturbations can inject Oort cloud objects into the inner parts of the solar system, where they may be observed as the long-period…

We discuss the detectability of gravitationally bounded pairs of gas-giant planets (which we call "binary planets") in extrasolar planetary systems that are formed through orbital instability followed by planet-planet dynamical tides during…

The Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey, specifically the Very Wide segment of data, is used to search for possible main-belt comets. In the first data set, 952 separate objects with asteroidal orbits within the main-belt are…

Aims: We predict the exoplanet yield of a space-based mid-infrared nulling interferometer using Monte Carlo simulations. We quantify the number and properties of detectable exoplanets and identify those target stars that have the highest or…

The modestly eccentric and non-coplanar orbits of the giant planets pose a challenge to solar system formation theories which generally indicate that the giant planets emerged from the protoplanetary disk in nearly perfectly circular and…

Observations of the youngest planets ($\sim$1-10 Myr for a transitional disk) will increase the accuracy of our planet formation models. Unfortunately, observations of such planets are challenging and time-consuming to undertake even in…

Measurements of the frequency with which short-period planets occur around main sequence stars allows a direct prediction of the number and types of such planets that will be amenable to characterization by high-contrast instruments on…