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There are growing amount of very high-resolution polarized scattered light images of circumstellar disks. Nascent giant planets planets are surrounded by their own circumplanetary disks which may scatter and polarize both the planetary and…
Technological civilizations may rely upon large-scale photovoltaic arrays to harness energy from their host star. Photovoltaic materials, such as silicon, possess distinctive spectral features, including an "artificial edge" that is…
The transparent Sun is modeled as a spherically symmetric and centrally condensed gravitational lens using recent Standard Solar Model (SSM) data. The Sun's minimum focal length is computed to a refined accuracy of 23.5 +/- 0.1 AU, just…
Stars twinkle to the eye through atmospheric turbulence, but planets, because of their larger angular size, do not. Similarly, scintillation due to the local interstellar medium will modulate the radio flux of gamma-ray-burst afterglows and…
Remote-sensing observations of Solar System objects with a space telescope offer a key method of understanding celestial bodies and contributing to planetary formation and evolution theories. The capabilities of Twinkle, a space telescope…
A model that combines celestial geometry and atmospheric physics is used to calculate the dimming of artificial satellites as they enter and exit the Earth's shadow. Refraction of sunlight by the terrestrial atmosphere can illuminate a…
The scattering of light dark matter off thermal electrons inside the Sun produces a "fast" sub-component of the dark matter flux that may be detectable in underground experiments. We update and extend previous work by analyzing the…
Due to their extremely small luminosity compared to the stars they orbit, planets outside our own Solar System are extraordinarily difficult to detect directly in optical light. Careful photometric monitoring of distant stars, however, can…
For terrestrial exoplanets with thin atmospheres or no atmospheres, the surface contributes light to the reflected light signal of the planet. Measurement of the variety of disk-integrated brightnesses of bodies in the Solar System and the…
Strong gravitational lenses allow us to peer into the farthest reaches of space by bending the light from a background object around a massive object in the foreground. Unfortunately, these lenses are extremely rare, and manually finding…
We show that space-based telescopes such as the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder Coronagraph will be able to detect the light scattered by the interstellar grains along lines of sight passing near stars in our Galaxy. The relative flux of…
Many stars -- if they could be imaged with enough angular resolution -- would exhibit features expected from theory but not possible to extract from spectra. We may group these by increasing complexity as follows. First, smooth variations…
The Solar Gravitational Lens (SGL) allows for major brightness amplification ($\sim 10^{11}$ at wavelength of $1~\mu$m) and extreme angular resolution ($\sim10^{-10}$ arcsec) within a narrow field of view. A meter-class telescope, with a…
The dynamic and secondary spectra of many pulsars show evidence for long-lived, aligned images of the pulsar that are stationary on a thin scattering sheet. One explanation for this phenomenon considers the effects of wave crests along…
Diffractive and refractive magnetospheric scintillations may allow a direct testing of the plasma inside the light cylinder. Unusual electrodynamics of the strongly magnetized electron-positron plasma allow separation of the magnetospheric…
We propose using large Air Cerenkov Telescopes (ACT's) to search for optical, pulsed signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence. Such dishes collect tens of photons from a nanosecond-scale pulse of isotropic equivalent power of tens of…
Close-in extrasolar giant planets may be directly detectable by their reflected light, due to the proximity of the planet to the illuminating star. The spectrum of the system will contain a reflected light component that varies in amplitude…
Stars twinkle because their light goes through the atmosphere. The same phenomenon is expected when the light of extra-galactic stars goes through a Galactic -- disk or halo -- refractive medium. Because of the large distances involved…
A photon of wavelength lambda ~1 micron interacting with a dust grain of radius a_p ~ 1 mm (a "pebble") undergoes scattering in the forward direction, largely within a small characteristic diffraction angle theta_s ~ lambda/a_p ~ 100".…
High-resolution spectroscopic searches for the starlight reflected from close-in extra-solar giant planets have the capability of determining the optical albedo spectra and scattering properties of these objects. When combined with radial…