Related papers: Ninth Planet or Wandering Star ?
The Kuiper belt is a remnant of the primordial Solar System. Measurements of its size distribution constrain its accretion and collisional history, and the importance of material strength of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). Small, sub-km sized,…
The conjecture is considered that every body induces the wave field which imposes oscillations on the gravitational potential of a body. The function for oscillations is chosen to prevent the gravitational collapse of the matter at the…
Exploring planetary systems similar to our solar system can provide a means to explore a large range of possibly temperate climates on Earth-like worlds. Rather than run hundreds of simulations with different eccentricities at fixed…
The proposed field-of-view of the Kepler mission is at an ecliptic latitude of ~55 degrees, where the surface density of scattered Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) is a few percent that in the ecliptic plane. The rate of occultations of Kepler…
We describe calculations of the evolution of an ensemble of small planetesimals in the outer solar system. In a solar nebula with a mass of several times the Minimum Mass Solar Nebula, objects with radii of 100-1000 km can form on…
Prior to the 1990s, speculations about the occurrence of planets around other stars were based only on planet formation theory, observations of circumstellar disks, and the knowledge that at least one seemingly ordinary star is the host of…
Kepler-78 is host to a transiting 8.5-hour orbit super-Earth. In this paper, the rotation and magnetic properties of the planet host star are studied. We first revisit the Kepler photometric data for a detailed description of the rotation…
Recent observations suggest that many planetary-mass objects may be present in the outer solar system between the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud. Gravitational perturbations may occasionally bring them into the inner solar system. Their…
The atmospheres of close-in extrasolar planets absorb most of the incident stellar radiation, advect this energy, then reradiate photons in preferential directions. Those photons carry away momentum, applying a force on the planet. Here we…
NASA's Kepler mission identified over 4000 extrasolar planets that transit (cross in front of) their host stars. This sample has revealed detailed features in the demographics of planet sizes and orbital spacings. However, knowledge of…
The known population of exoplanets exhibits a much wider range of orbital eccentricities than Solar System planets and has a much higher average eccentricity. These facts have been widely interpreted to indicate that the Solar System is an…
The twin Pioneer spacecraft have been tracked for over thirty years as they headed out of the solar system. After passing 20 AU from the Sun, both exhibited a systematic error in their trajectories that can be interpreted as a constant…
The outer solar system is theoretically predicted to harbour an undiscovered planet, often referred to as P9. Simulations suggest that its gravitational influence could explain the unusual clustering of minor bodies in the Kuiper Belt.…
The eccentricity distribution of exoplanets is known from radial velocity surveys to be divergent from circular orbits beyond 0.1 AU. This is particularly the case for large planets where the radial velocity technique is most sensitive. The…
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.…
White dwarfs are the end state of most stars, including the Sun, after they exhaust their nuclear fuel. Between 1/4 and 1/2 of white dwarfs have elements heavier than helium in their atmospheres, even though these elements should rapidly…
There exists a positive correlation between orbital eccentricity and the average stellar flux that planets receive from their parent star. Often, though, it is assumed that the average equilibrium temperature would correspondingly increase…
We investigate the effect of planetary rotation on the transit spectrum of an extrasolar giant planet. During ingress and egress, absorption features arising from the planet's atmosphere are Doppler shifted by of order the planet's…
It appears that at least several percent of large Kuiper belt objects are members of wide binaries. Physical collisions are too infrequent to account for their formation. Collisionless gravitational interactions are more promising. These…
We consider a hypothetical planet with the same mass $m$, radius $R$, angular momentum $\boldsymbol{S}$, oblateness $J_2$, semimajor axis $a$, eccentricity $e$, inclination $I$, and obliquity $\varepsilon$ of the Earth orbiting a…