Related papers: Detecting Interstellar Objects Through Stellar Occ…
There are several observational campaigns under way to detect kilometer size foreground Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) through their occultation of background stars. The interpretation of an occultation light curve, unfortunately, is affected…
The Kuiper belt is a remnant of the primordial Solar System. Measurements of its size distribution constrain its accretion and collisional history, and the importance of material strength of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). Small, sub-km sized,…
Using all the RXTE archival data of Sco X-1 and GX 5-1, which amount to about 1.6 mega seconds in total, we searched for possible occultation events caused by Oort Cloud Objects. The detection efficiency of our searching approach was…
The local detection rate of interstellar objects can allow for estimations of the total number of similar objects bound by the Milky Way thin disk. If interstellar objects of artificial origin are discovered, the estimated total number of…
Existing and planned optical telescopes and surveys can detect artificially-illuminated objects comparable in total brightness to a major terrestrial city out to the outskirts of the Solar System. Orbital parameters of Kuiper belt objects…
The OSER project (Optical Scintillation by Extraterrestrial Refractors) is proposed to search for scintillation of extragalactic sources through the galactic -- disk or halo -- transparent $\mathrm{H\_2}$ clouds, the last unknown baryonic…
We present here the analysis of about 19,500 new star hours of low ecliptic latitude observations (|b| < 20 deg) obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope's FGS over a time span of more than nine years; which is an addition to the 12,000 star…
We show that the occultation of Sagittarius A* by stars can be detected with space-based or space-ground very-long-baseline-interferometers (SVLBIs), with an expected event rate that is high due to relativistic precession. We compute the…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to detect serendipitous occultations of stars by small (about 1 km diameter) objects in the Kuiper Belt and beyond. Such events are very rare (<0.001 events per star per year) and short…
Interstellar dust is still the dominant uncertainty in Astronomy, limiting precision in e.g., cosmological distance estimates and models of how light is re-processed within a galaxy. When a foreground galaxy serendipitously overlaps a more…
During the months when the galactic bulge is visible from the southern hemisphere, there are typically about 8 to 10 on-going microlensing events at any given time. If the lensing stars have planets around them, then the signature of the…
We propose to design and build an algorithm that will use a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and observations from the Unistellar network to reliably detect asteroid occultations. The Unistellar Network, made of more than 10,000 digital…
Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) are thought to be the remnant of the early solar system, and their size distribution provides an opportunity to explore the formation and evolution of the outer solar system. In particular, the size distribution…
We use seven year's worth of observations from the Catalina Sky Survey and the Siding Spring Survey covering most of the northern and southern hemisphere at galactic latitudes higher than 20 degrees to search for serendipitously imaged…
Measuring the size distribution of small (km-scale) KBOs can help constrain models of Solar System formation and planetary migration. Such small, distant bodies are hard to detect with current or planned telescopes, but can be identified as…
We investigate the chance of detecting proto-planetary or debris disks in stars that induce microlensing events (lenses). The modification of the light curves shapes due to occultation and extinction by the disks as well as the additional…
It is proposed to search for scintillation of extragalactic sources through the last unknown baryonic structures. Appropriate observation of the scintillation process described here should allow one to detect column density stochastic…
Euclid, which is primarily a dark-energy/cosmology mission, may have a microlensing component, consisting of perhaps four dedicated one-month campaigns aimed at the Galactic bulge. We show that such a program would yield excellent…
Imaging Atmosphere Cherenkov Telescopes (IACT) are arrays of very large optical telescopes that are well-suited for rapid photometry of bright sources. I investigate their potential in observing stellar occultations by small objects in the…