Related papers: Characterizing Extra-solar Oort Clouds with Submil…

We performed numerical simulations of stellar occultations by extra-solar cometary tails. We find that extra-solar comets can be detected by the apparent photometric variations of the central stars. In most cases, the light curve shows a…

Odd radio circles (ORCs) are mysterious rings of faint, diffuse emission recently discovered in radio surveys, some of which may be associated with galaxies in relatively dense environments. We propose such ORCs to be synchrotron emission…

A detailed study of comets active at large heliocentric distances (greater than 4 au) which enter the Solar System for the first time and are composed of matter in its elementary, unprocessed state, would help in our understanding of the…

The occultation of background stars by foreground Solar system objects, such as planets and asteroids, has been widely used as an observational probe to study physical properties associated with the foreground sample. Similarly, the…

The extra-planar H I in the inner parts of the Milky Way has been discovered to contain numerous cloud-like structures when observed in the 21cm line with the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). These halo clouds have motions consistent with…

Long-period comets coming from the Oort cloud are thought to be planetesimals formed in the planetary region on the ecliptic plane. We have investigated the orbital evolution of these bodies due to the Galactic tide. We extended Higuchi et…

Comet C/2014 UN$_{271}$, alternative designation 'BB' after its discoverers 'Bernardinelli/Bernstein', and commonly referred to as UN$_{271}$, is an extreme case on two fronts, firstly its solar distance on discovery ($>$ 29 au) and…

Much of the focus of exoplanet atmosphere analysis in the coming decade will be atinfrared wavelengths, with the planned launches of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). However,…

We report the discovery of a minor planet (2006 SQ372) on an orbit with a perihelion of 24 AU and a semimajor axis of 796 AU. Dynamical simulations show that this is a transient orbit and is unstable on a timescale of 200 Myrs. Falling near…

Observations of dark cloud cores have been carried out in the mid-infrared using ISOCAM and in the far-infrared using ISOPHOT, both aboard the Infrared Space Observatory. The cores are in most cases detected in emission at 200 and 170…

Observations at 70 microns with the Spitzer Space Telescope have detected several stellar systems within 65 pc of the Sun. Of 18 presumably young systems detected in this study, as many as 15 have 70-micron emission in excess of that…

Stardust grains recovered from meteorites provide high-precision snapshots of the isotopic composition of the stellar environment in which they formed. Attributing their origin to specific types of stars, however, often proves difficult.…

The Orion Nebula Cluster and the molecular cloud in its vicinity have been observed with the ACIS-I detector on board the Chandra X-ray Observatory with 23 hours exposure. We detect 1075 X-ray sources: 91% are spatially associated with…

A variety of terrestrial planets with different physical parameters and exotic atmospheres might plausibly exist outside our Solar System, waiting to be detected by the next generation of space-exploration missions. Some of these planets…

This article relates two topics of central importance in modern astronomy - the discovery some fifteen years ago of the first planets around other stars (exoplanets), and the centuries-old problem of understanding the origin of our own…

Modelling of Extreme Scattering Events suggests that the Galaxy's dark matter is an undetected population of cold, AU-sized, planetary-mass gas clouds. None of the direct observational constraints on this picture -- thermal/non-thermal…

High levels of dust have been detected in the immediate vicinity of many stars, both young and old. A promising scenario to explain the presence of this short-lived dust is that these analogues to the Zodiacal cloud (or exozodis) are…

Excess near-infrared emission is detected around one fifth of main-sequence stars, but its nature is a mystery. These excesses are interpreted as thermal emission from populations of small, hot dust very close to their stars (`hot…

Exozodiacal dust is warm or hot dust found in the inner regions of planetary systems orbiting main sequence stars, in or around their habitable zones. The dust can be the most luminous component of extrasolar planetary systems, but…

A warm/hot dust component (at temperature $>$ 300K) has been detected around $\sim$ 20% of stars. This component is called "exozodiacal dust" as it presents similarities with the zodiacal dust detected in our Solar System, even though its…