Related papers: Turning up the heat on `Oumuamua
The recent discovery of a planetary transit in the star HD 209458, and the subsequent highly precise observation of the transit lightcurve with Hubble Space Telescope, is encouraging to search for any phenomena that might induce small…
This review article summarizes the advancement in the studies of Earth-affecting solar transients in the last decade that encompasses most of solar cycle 24. The Sun Earth is an integrated physical system in which the space environment of…
Since the 1980's it has been becoming increasingly clear that the Solar System's irregular satellites are collisionally evolved. We derive a general model for the collisional evolution of an irregular satellite swarm and apply it to the…
Transits on single stars are rare. The probability rarely exceeds a few per cent. Furthermore, this probability rapidly approaches zero at increasing orbital period. Therefore transit surveys have been predominantly limited to the inner…
Capture in mean motion resonance has been observed in the Solar System for small objects with prograde as well as retrograde orbits of moderate inclinations. However, no example of an object with a nearly polar orbit was known to be in…
We present the first attempt to fit the light curve of the interstellar visitor `Oumuamua using a physical model which includes optional torque. We consider both conventional (Lommel-Seeliger triaxial ellipsoid) and alternative…
To date, rings are found around a Centaur (10199) Chariklo, trans-neptunian objects (TNOs) (136108) Haumea, and (50000) Quaoar. These discoveries suggest that asteroidal ring systems may be common, particularly in the outer solar system.…
A recent study using $Hubble$ $Space$ $Telescope$ observations found periodic, high-speed, collimated ejections (or "bullets") from the star V Hya. The authors of that study proposed a model associating these bullets with the periastron…
The Sun will eventually lose about half of its current mass nonlinearly over several phases of post-main sequence evolution. This mass loss will cause any surviving orbiting body to increase its semimajor axis and perhaps vary its…
The galactic environment of the Sun varies over short timescales as the Sun and interstellar clouds travel through space. Small variations in the dynamics, ionization, density, and magnetic field strength of the interstellar medium (ISM)…
We integrated the orbital evolution of 30,000 Jupiter-family comets, 1300 resonant asteroids, and 7000 asteroidal, trans-Neptunian, and cometary dust particles. For initial orbital elements of bodies close to those of Comets 2P, 10P, 44P,…
The recent discovery of a planet in an orbit with eccentricity $e = 0.63 \pm 0.08$ around the Solar-type star 16 Cyg B, together with earlier discoveries of other planets in orbits of significant eccentricity, raises the question of the…
In single star systems like our own Solar system, comets dominate the mass budget of bodies that are ejected into interstellar space, since they form further away and are less tightly bound. However 1I/`Oumuamua, the first interstellar…
We provide a fast method for computing constraints on impactor pre-impact orbits, applying this to the late giant impacts in the Solar System. These constraints can be used to make quick, broad comparisons of different collision scenarios,…
Since the discovery of a planet transiting its host star in the year 2000, thousands of additional exoplanets and exoplanet candidates have been detected, mostly by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Some of them are almost as small as the…
Close-in super-Earths, with radii R = 2-5 R_Earth and orbital periods P < 100 days, orbit more than half, and perhaps nearly all Sun-like stars in the universe. We use this omnipresent population to construct the minimum-mass extrasolar…
Mutual events of trans-Neptunian binaries (TNBs) provide rare opportunities to measure the physical and orbital properties of small bodies in the outer solar system. However, successful observations of these events have been limited by…
The hundreds of exoplanets that have been discovered in the past two decades offer a new perspective on planetary structure. Instead of being the archetypal examples of planets, those of our Solar System are merely possible outcomes of…
The rotation periods of the host stars of extrasolar planets have been assessed against those of the Mt. Wilson stars, open cluster stars, and evolutionary stellar models that include rotation. They appear to be normal, modulo certain…
The Galactic bulge is a tumultuous dense region of space, packed with stars separated by far smaller distances than those in the Solar neighborhood. A quantification of the frequency and proximity of close stellar encounters in this…