Related papers: High-Drag Interstellar Objects And Galactic Dynami…
Over the course of its motion through the Galaxy, our solar system has encountered many interstellar environments of varying characteristics. Interstellar medium (ISM) density variations spanning seven orders of magnitude are commonly seen…
Within just two years, two interstellar objects (ISOs) - Oumuamuas and Borisov - have been discovered. Large quantities of planetesimals form as a by-product of planet formation. Therefore, it seems likely that ISOs are former planetesimals…
The fast outflow emerging from a region associated with massive star formation in the Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1), located behind the Orion Nebula, appears to have been set in motion by an explosive event. Here we study the structure…
We study the dynamics of faint stellar substructures around the Umbrella Galaxy, NGC 4651, which hosts a dramatic system of streams and shells formed through the tidal disruption of a nucleated dwarf elliptical galaxy. We elucidate the…
The nature and origin of the Galactic warp represent one of the open questions posed by Galactic evolution. Thanks to Gaia high precision absolute astrometry, steps towards the understanding of the warp's dynamical nature can be made.…
Diffuse interstellar clouds show large abundances of H_3^+ which can be maintained only by a high ionization rate of H_2. Cosmic rays are the dominant ionization mechanism in this environment, so the large ionization rate implies a high…
The dynamics of stellar streams in rotating barred potentials is explained for the first time. Naturally, neighbouring stream stars reach pericentre at slightly different times. In the presence of a rotating bar, these neighbouring stream…
The velocity distribution of stars in the Solar neighbourhood is inhomogeneous and rich with stellar streams and kinematic structures. These may retain important clues of the formation and dynamical history of the Milky Way. However, the…
The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS shows a weak cometary activity. Its brightness suggests a maximum radius of ~10km (A/0.05)^{-1/2} for an asteroid with an albedo A. I show that interstellar objects with that radius would amount to an…
We have cross-matched the LAMOST DR3 with the Gaia DR1 TGAS catalogs and obtained a sample of 166,827 stars with reliable kinematics. A technique based on the wavelet transform was applied to detect significant overdensities in velocity…
Light curve observations of a recently discovered interstellar object 1I/`Oumuamua suggest that this object has an extremely elongated shape with the axis ratio 0.3 or smaller. Planetesimal collisions can produce irregular shapes including…
The combination of deep imaging data and kinematic measurements in galaxy outskirts promises to reveal extensive insights into the structure and history of individual galaxies. From a census of tidal features around galaxies from the…
The GD-1 stream is one of the longest and coldest stellar streams discovered to date, and one of the best objects for constraining the dark matter properties of the Milky Way. Using data from {\it Gaia} DR2 we study the proper motions,…
The chance discovery of the first interstellar minor body, 1I/2017 U1 (`Oumuamua), indicates that we may have been visited by such objects in the past and that these events may repeat in the future. Unfortunately, minor bodies following…
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS displayed a small but statistically significant non-gravitational acceleration during its passage through the inner Solar System. Using a thermophysical model coupled with stochastic sampling of jet…
We present a spectroscopic survey of the giant stellar stream found in the halo of the Andromeda galaxy. Taken with the DEIMOS multi-object spectrograph on the Keck2 telescope, these data display a narrow velocity dispersion of 11+/-3 km/s,…
Star streams in galactic halos are long, thin, unbound structures that will be disturbed by the thousands dark matter sub-halos that are predicted to be orbiting within the main halo. A sub-halo generally induces a localized wave in the…
We investigate the trapping of interstellar objects during the early stages of star and planet formation. Our results show a very wide range of possible values that will be narrowed down as the population of interstellar objects becomes…
We explore the vicinity of the Milky Way through the use of spectro-photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and high-quality proper motions derived from multi-epoch positions extracted from the Guide Star Catalogue II database.…
Outflows and winds launched from young stars play a crucial role in the evolution of protostars and the early stages of planet formation. However, the specific details of the mechanism behind these phenomena, including how they affect the…