Related papers: Looking for Lurkers
The understanding of the nature of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is one of the most intriguing open questions for current and future observatories. These particles are expected to be accelerated in extragalactic sources. Because of their…
The proposed US Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) Program would secure national open access to at least 25% of the observing time on the Thirty Meter Telescope in the north and the Giant Magellan Telescope in the south. ELTs would advance…
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…
Exoplanetary systems are prime targets for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). With the recent uptick in the identification of candidate and confirmed exoplanets through the work of missions like the Transiting Exoplanet…
One of the most exciting scientific challenges is to detect Earth-like planets in the habitable zones of other stars in the galaxy and search for evidence of life. The ability to observe and characterise dozens of potentially Earth-like…
To-date, all human economic activity has depended on the resources of a single planet, and it has long been recognized that developments in space exploration could in principle open our closed planetary economy to external resources of…
Neutron stars provide a compelling testing ground for gravity, nuclear dynamics, and physics beyond the Standard Model, and so it will be useful to locate the neutron stars nearest to Earth. To that end, we revisit pulsar distance estimates…
Through the international collaborators, we recently established a network of existing and working meter-class telescopes to look for planetary transit events. As a first step, we focus on the TrES3 system, and conclude that there could be…
Searches for planets via gravitational lensing have focused on cases in which the projected separation, a, between planet and star is comparable to the Einstein radius, R_E. This paper considers smaller orbital separations and demonstrates…
The CoRoT satellite is the first instrument hunting for planets from space. We will review the status of the CoRoT/Exoplanet program. We will then present the CoRoT exoplanetary systems and how they widen the range of properties of the…
Despite numerous search campaigns based on a diverse set of observational techniques, exomoons - prospective satellites of extrasolar planets - remain an elusive and hard-to-pin-down class of objects. Yet, the case for intensifying this…
Upcoming high-intensity laser systems will be able to probe the quantum-induced nonlinear regime of electrodynamics. So far unobserved QED phenomena such as the discovery of a nonlinear response of the quantum vacuum to macroscopic…
Deliberate and unintentional radio transmissions from Earth propagate into space. These transmissions could be detected by extraterrestrial watchers over interstellar distances. Here, we analyze the harms and benefits of deliberate and…
The successful prediction of lensing events is a new and exciting enterprise that provides opportunities to discover and study planetary systems. The companion paper investigates the underlying theory. This paper is devoted to outlining the…
In this paper we review the experimental and observational searches for stable, massive, elementary particles other than the electron and proton. The particles may be neutral, may have unit charge or may have fractional charge. They may…
The detections of small, rocky exoplanets have surged in recent years and will likely continue to do so. To know whether a rocky exoplanet is habitable, we have to characterise its atmosphere and surface. A promising characterisation method…
Context. The paths followed by the known extreme trans-Neptunian objects (ETNOs) effectively avoid direct gravitational perturbations from the four giant planets, yet their orbital eccentricities are in the range between 0.69-0.97. Solar…
The recent discovery of the first confirmed Interstellar Objects (ISOs) passing through the Solar System on clearly hyperbolic objects opens the potential for near term ISO missions, either to the two known objects, or to similar objects…
With the detection of a binary neutron star system and its corresponding electromagnetic counterparts, a new window of transient astronomy has opened. Due to the size of the error regions, which can span hundreds to thousands of square…
Giant planets within the habitable zones of the closest several stars can currently be imaged with ground-based telescopes. Within the next decade, the Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) will begin to image the habitable zones of a greater…