Related papers: Variegation and space weathering on asteroid 21 Lu…
Most meteorites are fragments from recent collisions experienced in the asteroid belt. In such a hyper-velocity collision, the smaller collision partner is destroyed, whereas a crater on the asteroid is formed or it is entirely disrupted,…
A diurnal varying haze layer at the bright spots of Occator on dwarf planet Ceres has been reported from images of the Dawn Framing Camera. This finding is supported by ground-based observations revealing diurnal albedo changes at Occator's…
Magnetic fields grown by instabilities driven by differential rotation are believed to be essential to accretion onto black holes. These instabilities saturate in a turbulent state; therefore, the spatial and temporal variability in the…
This work describes the correction method applied to the dataset acquired at the asteroid (4) Vesta by the visible channel of the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer. The rising detector temperature during data acquisitions in the…
Context. Over the past decades, several interplanetary missions have studied small bodies in situ, leading to major advances in our understanding of their geological and geophysical properties. These missions, however, have had a limited…
In 2021 BL Lacertae underwent an extraordinary activity phase, which was intensively followed by the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT) Collaboration. We present the WEBT optical data in the BVRI bands acquired at 36 observatories around…
We present high-precision photometry on 107 variable low-mass stars and brown dwarfs in the ~3 Myr Sigma Orionis open cluster. We have carried out I-band photometric monitoring within two fields, encompassing 153 confirmed or candidate…
On July 14th 2015, NASA's New Horizons mission gave us an unprecedented detailed view of the Pluto system. The complex compositional diversity of Pluto's encounter hemisphere was revealed by the Ralph/LEISA infrared spectrometer on board of…
In 2022 the BL Lac object S4 0954+65 underwent a major variability phase, reaching its historical maximum brightness in the optical and $\gamma$-ray bands. We present optical photometric and polarimetric data acquired by the Whole Earth…
We investigated the color and morphology of optically selected galaxies in the region of clusters at z $\sim$ 1.2 near to the radio galaxy 3C 324 using archived data taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The faint galaxies selected at the…
The NASA Dawn spacecraft acquired thousands of images of asteroid Vesta during its year-long orbital tour, and is now on its way to asteroid Ceres. A method for calibrating images acquired by the onboard Framing Camera was described by…
We investigated the reliability of the genetic algorithm which will be used to invert the photometric measurements of asteroids collected by the European Space Agency Gaia mission. To do that, we performed several sets of simulations for 10…
Among active galactic nuclei, blazars show extreme variability properties. We here investigate the case of the BL Lac object S4 0954+65 with data acquired in 2019-2020 by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and by the Whole…
This study presents the first optical spectropolarimetric study of large C-complex asteroids. A total of 64 C-complex asteroids of different subclasses are analyzed using archival polarimetric and reflectance data to refine the link between…
We studied the well known circumstellar disk around the Herbig Ae/Be star HD 97048 with high angular resolution to reveal undetected structures in the disk, which may be indicative of disk evolutionary processes such as planet formation. We…
Haze in Pluto's atmosphere was detected in images by both the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) and the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC) on New Horizons. LORRI observed haze up to altitudes of at least 200 km above Pluto's…
We have obtained surface photometry in U, B, R and I for a complete optically selected sample of 45 early-type spiral galaxies, to investigate the colors and color gradients of spiral bulges. Color profiles in U-R, B-R, U-B and R-I have…
We quantify quasar color-variability using an unprecedented variability database - ugriz photometry of 9093 quasars from SDSS Stripe 82, observed over 8 years at ~60 epochs each. We confirm previous reports that quasars become bluer when…
Extremely large telescopes (ELTs) provide an opportunity to observe surface inhomogeneities for ultracool objects including M dwarfs, brown dwarfs (BDs), and gas giant planets via Doppler imaging and spectro-photometry techniques. These…
The Cassini spacecraft made a gravity assist flyby of Jupiter in December 2000. The Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) acquired images of the planet that covered the visual range with filters sensitive to the distribution of clouds and hazes,…