Related papers: Asteroid mass estimation using Markov-chain Monte …
While of order a million asteroids have been discovered, the number in rigorously controlled samples that have precise orbits and rotation periods, as well as well-measured colors, is relatively small. In particular, less than a dozen…
Most of the super massive black hole mass estimates based on stellar kinematics use the assumption that galaxies are axisymmetric oblate spheroids or spherical. Here we use fully general triaxial orbit-based models to explore the effect of…
The main belt, the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, is home to more than 1 million asteroids. These asteroids form orbital groups, (i.e., asteroid families formed by collisions) and also spectral groups (taxonomies) with…
Astrometric measurements of stellar systems are becoming significantly more precise and common, with many ground and space-based instruments and missions approaching 1 microarcsecond precision. We examine the multi-wavelength astrometric…
A classical approach for approximating expectations of functions w.r.t. partially known distributions is to compute the average of function values along a trajectory of a Metropolis-Hastings (MH) Markov chain. A key part in the MH algorithm…
We studied 93 asteroid pairs. We estimated times elapsed since separation of pair members that are between 7*10^3 and a few 10^6 yr. We derived the rotation periods for all the primaries and a sample of secondaries. We derived the absolute…
The two most common mass estimators that use velocity dispersions and positions of objects in a stellar system, the virial mass estimator (VME) and the projected mass estimator (PME), are revisited and tested using N-body experiments. We…
In asteroid rendezvous missions, the dynamical environment near the asteroid's surface should be made clear prior to the mission launch. However, most of the asteroids have irregular shapes, which lower the efficiency of calculating their…
We develop and apply methods to extract planet masses and eccentricities from observed transit time variations (TTVs). First, we derive simple analytic expressions for the TTV that include the effects of both first- and second-order…
In order to fully understand the shapes of asteroids families in the 3-dimensional space of the proper elements $(a_{\rm p}, e_{\rm p}, \sin I_{\rm p})$ it is necessary to compare observed asteroids with N-body simulations. To this point,…
We provide a taxonomic and compositional characterization of Multiple Asteroid Systems (MASs) located in the main belt (MB) using visible and near-infrared (0.45-2.5 um) spectral data of 42 MB MASs. The mineralogical analysis is applied to…
Thanks to the Gaia mission, it will be possible to determine the masses of approximately hundreds of large main belt asteroids with very good precision. We currently have diameter estimates for all of them that can be used to compute their…
We study the secular effects in the motion of an asteroid with negligible mass in a spatial restricted elliptic three body problem with arbitrary inclination. Averaging over mean anomalies of the asteroid and the planet are applied to…
This investigation uses the excellent HARPS radial velocity measurements of CoRoT-7 to re-determine the planet masses and to explore techniques able to determine mass and elements of planets discovered around active stars when the relative…
We report on the serendipitous observations of Solar System objects imaged during the High cadence Transient Survey (HiTS) 2014 observation campaign. Data from this high cadence, wide field survey was originally analyzed for finding…
We present a vector formulation of an interferometric observation of a star, including the effects of the barycentric motion of the observatory, the proper motions of the star, and the reflex motions of the star due to orbiting planets. We…
The taxonomic classification of asteroids has been mostly based on spectroscopic observations with wavelengths spanning from the VIS to the NIR. VIS-NIR spectra of $\sim$2500 asteroids have been obtained since the 1970s; the SDSS MOC 4 was…
Asteroids and other small bodies in the solar system tend to have irregular shapes, owing to their low gravity. This irregularity does not only apply to the topology, but also to the underlying geology, potentially containing regions of…
The basic question in perturbation analysis of Markov chains is: how do small changes in the transition kernels of Markov chains translate to chains in their stationary distributions? Many papers on the subject have shown, roughly, that the…
Matter at ultra-high densities finds a physical realization inside neutron stars. One key property is their maximum mass, which has far-reaching implications for astrophysics and the equation of state of ultra dense matter. In this work, we…