Related papers: Was Planet 9 captured in the Sun's natal star-form…
We investigate the prospects for the capture of the proposed Planet 9 from other stars in the Sun's birth cluster. Any capture scenario must satisfy three conditions: the encounter must be more distant than ~150 au to avoid perturbing the…
Unexpected clustering in the orbital elements of minor bodies beyond the Kuiper belt has led to speculations that our solar system actually hosts nine planets, the eight established plus a hypothetical "Planet Nine". Several recent studies…
In recent years several planets have been discovered at wide orbits (>100 AU) around their host stars. Theoretical studies encounter difficulties in explaining their formation and origin. Here we propose a novel scenario for the production…
Motivated by the report of a possible new planetary member of the Solar System, this work calculates cross sections for interactions between passing stars and this proposed Planet Nine. Evidence for the new planet is provided by the orbital…
Over the course of the past two decades, observational surveys have unveiled the intricate orbital structure of the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy bodies orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune. In addition to a host of readily-predictable orbital…
In the past decade, numerical simulations started to reveal the possible existence of planet 9 in our solar system. The planet 9 scenario can provide an excellent explanation to the clustering in orbital elements for Kuiper Belt objects.…
Correlations in the orbits of several minor planets in the outer solar system suggest the presence of a remote, massive Planet Nine. With at least ten times the mass of the Earth and a perihelion well beyond 100 AU, Planet Nine poses a…
The longitudes of perihelia and orbital poles of the solar system's dozen or so most remote detected objects are clustered in a manner inconsistent with that of a random sample of uniformly distributed orbits. While small number statistics…
Gas giant planets have been detected on eccentric orbits several hundreds of astronomical units in size around other stars. It has been proposed that even the Sun hosts a wide-orbit planet of 5-10 Earth masses, often called Planet Nine,…
Motivated by recent measurements of the free-floating planet mass function at terrestrial masses, we consider the possibility that the solar system may have captured a terrestrial planet early in its history. We show that $\sim 1.2$…
The most distant Kuiper belt objects appear to be clustered in longitude of perihelion and in orbital pole position. To date, the only two suggestions for the cause of these apparent clusterings have been either the effects of observational…
The discovery of Sedna places new constraints on the origin and evolution of our solar system. Here we investigate the possibility that a close encounter with another star produced the observed edge of the Kuiper belt, at roughly 50 AU, and…
We perform a simulation using the Astrophysical Multipurpose Software Environment of the Orion Trapezium star cluster in which the evolution of the stars and the dynamics of planetary systems are taken into account. The initial conditions…
The anomalous orbits of Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) can be explained by the Planet 9 hypothesis. We propose that the Planet 9 can be an axion star. Axion stars are gravitational bound clusters condensed by QCD axions or axion-like…
Using the observed properties of our solar system, in particular the isotopic compositions of meteorites and the regularity of the planetary orbits, we constrain the star formation environment of the Sun within the scenario of (external)…
The capture of the free-floating planets and primordial black holes into a collapsing protostellar cloud is considered. Although the last stage of rapid contraction leading to the star formation lasts for a relatively short time $\sim 10^5$…
The Capture Theory gives planet production through a tidal interaction between a condensed star and a diffuse protostar within a dense embedded cluster. Initial extensive and highly eccentric planetary orbits round-off and decay in a…
The existence of a giant planet beyond Neptune -- referred to as Planet Nine (P9) -- has been inferred from the clustering of longitude of perihelion and pole position of distant eccentric Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). After updating…
The outer solar system exhibits an anomalous pattern of orbital clustering, characterized by an approximate alignment of the apsidal lines and angular momentum vectors of distant, long-term stable Kuiper belt objects. One explanation for…
We have simulated encounters between planetary systems and single stars in various clustered environments. This allows us to estimate the fraction of systems liberated, the velocity distribution of the liberated planets, and the separation…