Related papers: Orbital clustering in the distant solar system
Planet formation is often considered in the context of one circumstellar disk around one star. Yet stellar binary systems are ubiquitous, and thus a substantial fraction of all potential planets must form and evolve in more complex,…
Given the importance of clusters to the fields of cosmology and galaxy evolution, it is critical to understand how the cluster detection process affects (biases) ones scientific conclusions derived from a given cluster sample. I review the…
We examine the orbital element distribution of main-belt comets (MBCs), which are objects that exhibit cometary activity yet orbit in the main asteroid belt, and may be potentially useful as tracers of ice in the inner solar system. We find…
The planet candidate Fomalhaut b is bright in optical light but undetected in longer wavelengths, requiring a large, reflective dust cloud. The most recent observations find an extremely eccentric orbit (e ~ 0.8), indicating that Fomalhaut…
We demonstrate that microlensing can be used for detecting planets in binary stellar systems. This is possible because in the geometry of planetary binary systems where the planet orbits one of the binary component and the other binary star…
Galaxy clusters identified with optical imaging tend to suffer from projection effects, which impact richness (the number of member galaxies in a cluster) and lensing coherently. Physically unassociated galaxies can be mistaken as cluster…
Most star complexes are in fact complexes of stars, clusters and gas clouds; term "star complexes" was introduced as general one disregarding the preferential content of a complex. Generally the high rate of star formation in a complex is…
We review recent advancements in cosmology with galaxy clusters. Galaxy clusters are the most massive objects in the Universe. Consequently the cluster number density as a function of cluster mass, or cluster abundance, is sensitive to…
We examine the possibility of detecting signatures of surviving Uranus-Neptune-like planets inside planetary nebulae. Planets that are not too close to the stars, orbital separation larger than about 5 AU, are likely to survive the entire…
The stellar obliquity of a transiting planetary system can be constrained by combining measurements of the star's rotation period, radius, and projected rotational velocity. Here we present a hierarchical Bayesian technique for recovering…
The orbital distribution of the S-star cluster surrounding the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way is analyzed. A tight, roughly exponential dependence of the pericenter distance r$_{p}$ on orbital eccentricity…
Misalignments between planetary orbits and the equatorial planes of their host stars are clues about the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Earlier work found evidence for a peak near $90^\circ$ in the distribution of stellar…
Extensive surveys of galaxy clusters motivate us to assess the likelihood of cluster-cluster lensing (CCL), namely, gravitational-lensing of a background cluster by a foreground cluster. We briefly describe the characteristics of CCLs in…
The Sun and >15 percent of nearby stars are surrounded by dusty debris disks that must be collisionally replenished by asteroids and comets, as the dust would otherwise be depleted on <10 Myr timescales (ref. 1). Theoretical studies show…
Motivated by the significant overdensity of background bright quasars recently detected behind the foreground clusters of galaxies on scale of $10$ arcminutes, we have investigated the possibility of attributing the quasar-cluster…
A simple dynamical model is employed to study the possible orbital evolution of scattered planets and phase plane analysis is used to classify the parameter space and solutions. Our results reconfirm that there is always an increase in…
Most stars form in clusters where relatively close encounters with other stars are common and can leave imprints on the orbital architecture of planetary systems. In this paper, we investigate the inclination excitation of debris disk…
We employ an efficient numerical approach to simulate a stationary distribution of test objects, which results from their gravitational scattering on the four giant planets, with accounting for effects of mean motion resonances. Using the…
More than 100 microlensing events have been detected during the last ~4 years, most of them towards the Galactic Bulge. Since the line of sight towards the Bulge passes through the disk and the Bulge itself, the known stars towards the…
We specify the range to which perturbations penetrate a planetesimal system. Such perturbations can originate from massive planets or from encounters with other stars. The latter can have an origin in the star cluster in which the planetary…