Related papers: Solar Obliquity Induced by Planet Nine: Simple Cal…
Mean densities of major and dwarf planets are possible to calculate by the values of the planets distance to the Sun, the mean densities of massive natural satellites of planets are computable by the satellites distance to the Sun and the…
The POLAR Investigation of the Sun (POLARIS) mission uses a combination of a gravity assist and solar sail propulsion to place a spacecraft in a 0.48 AU circular orbit around the Sun with an inclination of 75 degrees with respect to solar…
The observation that the orbits of long-period Kuiper Belt objects are anomalously clustered in physical space has recently prompted the Planet Nine hypothesis - the proposed existence of a distant and eccentric planetary member of our…
The obliquity of a planet is the tilt between its equator and its orbital plane. Giant planets are expected to form with near-zero obliquities. After its formation, some dynamical mechanism must therefore have tilted Saturn up to its…
Many exoplanets in close-in orbits are observed to have relatively high eccentricities and large stellar obliquities. We explore the possibility that these result from planet-planet scattering by studying the dynamical outcomes from a large…
The insolation a planet receives from its parent star is the main driver of the climate and depends on the planet's orbital configuration. Planets with non-zero obliquity and eccentricity experience seasonal insolation variations. As a…
One of the most remarkable properties of extrasolar planets is their high orbital eccentricities. Observations have shown that at least 20% of these planets, including some with particularly high eccentricities, are orbiting a component of…
Commenting the 11-year sunspot cycle, Wolf (1859, MNRAS 19, 85-86) conjectured that "the variations of spot frequency depend on the influences of Venus, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn". The high synchronization of our planetary system is…
A distant, massive planet in the outer solar system has recently been proposed to explain some observed features of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Here we use N-body simulations of the formation of the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud as…
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…
Continued observational characterization of transiting planets that reside in close proximity to their host stars has shown that a substantial fraction of such objects posses orbits that are inclined with respect to the spin axes of their…
We investigate how the variation of the obliquity (the axial tilt) of a hypothetical exo-Earth is effected by the presence of a satellite, an exo-Moon. Namely, we study analytically and numerically how the range of obliquity of the…
With several detections, the technique of gravitational microlensing has proven useful for studying planets that orbit stars at Galactic distances, and it can even be applied to detect planets in neighbouring galaxies. So far, planet…
We have reexamined the possibility of explaining the solar neutrino problem through long-wavelength neutrino oscillations induced by a tiny breakdown of the weak equivalence principle of general relativity. We found that such…
Previous studies have shown that planets that rotate retrograde (backwards with respect to their orbital motion) generally experience less severe obliquity variations than those that rotate prograde (the same direction as their orbital…
Context. True spin-orbit obliquities {\Psi} offer valuable insights into the evolutionary history of exoplanetary systems. Previous studies have suggested that exoplanets tend to occupy either aligned or perpendicular orbits. However,…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
The most puzzling property of the extrasolar planets discovered by recent radial velocity surveys is their high orbital eccentricities, which are very difficult to explain within our current theoretical paradigm for planet formation.…
Solar quasi-biennial oscillations with period range 0.6 to 4 years, are prominent in records of solar activity. Here we show that the 1.6 year quasi-biennial oscillation in solar activity has the exceptional feature of phase inversion…
According to general relativity, a spinning body of mass M and angular momentum S, like a star or a planet, generates a gravitomagnetic field which induces, among other phenomena, also the Lense-Thirring effect, i.e. secular precessions of…