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Thousands of extrasolar planets have been discovered, and it is clear that the galactic planetary census draws on a diversity greatly exceeding that exhibited by the solar system's planets. We review significant landmarks in the chronology…
Context: We use phase curves of small bodies to measure absolute magnitudes and, together with complementary theoretical and laboratory results, to understand their surfaces' micro and macroscopic properties. Although we can observe…
Modern lunar-planetary ephemerides are numerically integrated on the observational timespan of more than 100 years (with the last 20 years having very precise astrometrical data). On such long timespans, not only finite difference…
We derive the equations of celestial mechanics governing the variations of the orbital elements under a stochastic perturbation generalizing the classical Gauss equations. Explicit formulas are given for the semi-major axis, the…
Orbital solutions for binary or multiple stellar systems that combine astrometry (e.g., position angles and angular separations) with spectroscopy (radial velocities) have important advantages over astrometric-only or spectroscopic-only…
Reliable prediction of stellar diameters, particularly angular diameters, is a useful and necessary tool for the increasing number of milliarcsecond resolution studies being carried out in the astronomical community. A new and accurate…
The increasing number and variety of extrasolar planets illustrates the importance of characterizing planetary perturbations. Planetary orbits are typically described by physically intuitive orbital elements. Here, we explicitly express the…
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…
The characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres has come of age in the last decade, as astronomical techniques now allow for albedos, chemical abundances, temperature profiles and maps, rotation periods and even wind speeds to be measured.…
We introduce a new method of searching for and characterizing extra-solar planets. We show that by monitoring the center-of-light motion of microlensing alerts using the next generation of high precision astrometric instruments the…
The prospects for finding transiting exoplanets in the range of a few to 20 Earth masses is growing rapidly with both ground-based and spaced-based efforts. We describe a publicly available computer code to compute and quantify the…
We present a simple approach for obtaining robust values of astrophysical parameters from the observed colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of star clusters. The basic inputs are the Hess diagram built with the photometric measurements of a…
An automatic Bayesian Kepler periodogram has been developed for identifying and characterizing multiple planetary orbits in precision radial velocity data. The periodogram is powered by a parallel tempering MCMC algorithm which is capable…
A review of a renewed effort to recalculate astrophysical opacities using the R-Matrix method is presented. The computational methods and new extensions are described. Resulting enhancements found in test calculations under stellar interior…
The historical Hungarian auroral record extends from 1523 to 1960 and is longer than the sunspot record. Harmonic analysis reveals four major multidecadal secular cycles forming an approximate harmonic set at periods of 42.85, 57.13, 85.7…
We report a method that uses "completeness" to estimate the number of exrasolar planets discovered by an observing program with a direct-imaging instrument. We develop a completeness function for Earth-like planets on "habitable" orbits for…
We present the cosmological parameters constraints obtained from the combination of galaxy cluster mass function measurements (Vikhlinin et al., 2009a,b) with new cosmological data obtained during last three years: updated measurements of…
In the last decade a major debate has emerged on the astrophysics community concerning the anomalous behaviour of the astronomical unit, the fundamental scale of distances in the Solar system. Several independent studies have combined radar…
We summarize some of the compelling new scientific opportunities for understanding stars and stellar systems that can be enabled by sub-milliarcsec (sub-mas) angular resolution, UV-Optical spectral imaging observations, which can reveal the…
The EPM2011 ephemerides are computed using an updated dynamical model, new values of the parameters, and an extended observation database that contains about 680 000 positional measurements of various types obtained from 1913 to 2011. The…