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We present a study of the current state of knowledge concerning spacecraft operations and potential hazards while operating near a comet nucleus. Starting from simple calculations comparing the cometary coma environment to benign conditions…
Planet formation theories predict a large but still undetected population of short-period terrestrial planets orbiting brown dwarfs. Should specimens of this population be discovered transiting relatively bright and nearby brown dwarfs, the…
HR8799 is a nearby A-type star with a debris disk and three planetary candidates recently imaged directly. We undertake a coherent analysis of various portions of observational data on all known components of the system. The goal is to…
The New Horizons ALICE instrument is a lightweight (4.4 kg), low-power (4.4 Watt) imaging spectrograph aboard the New Horizons mission to Pluto/Charon and the Kuiper Belt. Its primary job is to determine the relative abundances of various…
We describe a search for dust created in collisions between the Saturnian irregular satellites using archival \emph{Spitzer} MIPS observations. Although we detected a degree scale Saturn-centric excess that might be attributed to an…
We consider generic rotating axially symmetric "dirty" (surrounded by matter) black holes. Near-horizon circular equatorial orbits are examined in two different cases of near-extremal (small surface gravity $\kappa $) and exactly extremal…
The observed near-Earth asteroid population contains very few objects with small perihelion distances, say, q<=0.2 au. NEAs that currently have orbits with larger q might be hiding a past evolution during which they have approached closer…
The amount of debris in orbit has increased significantly over the years. With the recent growth of interest in space exploration, conjunction assessment has become a central issue. One important metric to evaluate conjunction risk is the…
We have used the galaxy modeling algorithm \texttt{GravPot16}, to explore the more probable orbital elements of a sample of 64 selected N-rich stars across the Milky Way. Using the newly measured proper motions from \texttt{Gaia} DR2 with…
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…
We measure the angle between the planetary orbit and the stellar rotation axis in the transiting planetary system CoRoT-1, with new HIRES/Keck and FORS/VLT high-accuracy photometry. The data indicate a highly tilted system, with a projected…
By using recent observations of the Dydimos-Dimorphos system from the Hubble Space Telescope, 37 boulders with a size of 4 to 7 meters ejected from the system during the impact with the DART spacecraft were identified. In this work, we…
In this paper we report on the first five out of eleven observations in our programme of Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging of old nova shells. We present new WFPC2 images of the shells around FH Ser and V533 Her taken in the F656N…
In the high-eccentricity migration (HEM) scenario, close-in planets reach the vicinity of the central star on high-eccentricity orbits that become circularized---with a concomitant decrease in the semimajor axis---through a tidal…
We use the Horizon Run 4 cosmological N -body simulation to study the effects of distant and close interactions on the alignments of the shapes, spins, and orbits of targets haloes with their neighbours, and their dependence on the local…
Many black hole (BH) candidates have been discovered in X-ray binaries and in the nuclei of galaxies. The prediction of Einstein's general relativity is that BHs have an event horizon --- a one-way membrane through which particles fall into…
The images of Sagittarius A$^*$ recently released by the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration have been accompanied [Ap.J.Lett.\,{\bf 930\,\#2}\,(2022)\,L17] by an analysis of the constraints on the possible absence of a trapping horizon,…
The aim is to show that in case of low probability of asteroid collision with Earth, the appropriate selection and weighing of the data are crucial for the impact investigation, and to analyze the impact possibilities using extensive…
Given the inexorable increase in the Sun's luminosity, Earth will exit the habitable zone in ~1 Gyr. There is a negligible chance that Earth's orbit will change during that time through internal Solar System dynamics. However, there is a…
The addition of an external starshade to the {\it Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope} will enable the direct imaging of Earth-radius planets orbiting at $\sim$1 AU. Classification of any detected planets as Earth-like requires both…