Related papers: Initial results from the New Horizons exploration …
Abridged. We have performed an ecliptic survey of the Kuiper belt, with an areal coverage of 8.9 square degrees to a 50% limiting magnitude of r'=24.7, and have detected 88 Kuiper belt objects, roughly half of which received follow-up one…
The classical Kuiper belt contains objects both from a low-inclination, presumably primordial, distribution and from a high-inclination dynamically excited population. Based on a sample of classical TNOs with observations at thermal…
Object 1I/2017 U1 (`Oumuamua) is the first interstellar small body ever discovered in the solar system. By the time of discovery, it had already passed perihelion. To investigate the behavior of `Oumuamua around perihelion, we searched for…
We present new observations of the cosmic ultraviolet background (CUVB) at high Galactic latitudes ($|b| > 40^{\circ}$), made using the Alice UV spectrograph on board the New Horizons spacecraft. These observations were taken at about 57 AU…
The outer solar system is theoretically predicted to harbour an undiscovered planet, often referred to as P9. Simulations suggest that its gravitational influence could explain the unusual clustering of minor bodies in the Kuiper Belt.…
We conducted a search for occultations of bright stars by Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) to estimate the density of sub-km KBOs in the sky. We report here the first results of this occultation survey of the outer solar system conducted in June…
It is speculated that some weakly active comets may be transitional objects between active and dormant comets. These objects are at a unique stage of the evolution of cometary nuclei, as they are still identifiable as active comets, in…
More than 100 extrasolar planets have been discovered since 1990s. Different from the solar system, these planets' orbital eccentricities cover a huge range from 0 to 0.7. Incidently, the first Kuiper Belt Object was discovered in 1992.…
On 2018 November 18, coronagraphs onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured an unrecognized comet crossing its fields of view. We identified this comet to be the minor planet (139359) 2001 ME1 whose previously unnoticed…
The discovery that many trans-neptunian objects exist in pairs, or binaries, is proving invaluable for shedding light on the formation, evolution and structure of the outer Solar system. Based on recent systematic searches it has been…
(Abridged) Using an efficient computational approach, we have reconstructed the structure of the dust cloud in the Solar system between 0.5 and 100 AU produced by the Kuiper belt objects. Our simulations offer a 3-D physical model of the…
Debris disks are extrasolar analogs to our own Kuiper Belt and they are detected around at least 17% of nearby Sun-like stars. The morphology and dynamics of a disk encode information about its history, as well as that of any exoplanets…
We present the results of a Herschel survey of 21 late-type stars that host planets discovered by the radial velocity technique. The aims were to discover new disks in these systems and to search for any correlation between planet presence…
A distant, massive planet in the outer solar system has recently been proposed to explain some observed features of extreme trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Here we use N-body simulations of the formation of the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud as…
Detecting heat from minor planets in the outer solar system is challenging, yet it is the most efficient means for constraining the albedos and sizes of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) and their progeny, the Centaur objects. These physical…
The cold main classical Kuiper Belt consists of those non-resonant small solar system bodies with low orbital inclinations and orbital semi-major axes between 42.4 and 47.7 au. These objects likely formed \textit{in situ} and the population…
The presence of debris disks around young main sequence stars hints at the existence and structure of planetary systems. Millimeter-wavelength observations probe large grains that trace the location of planetesimal belts. The FEPS…
Haumea, a rapidly rotating elongated dwarf planet (~ 1500 km in diameter), has two satellites and is associated with a "family" of several smaller Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) in similar orbits. All members of the Haumea system share a water…
HD95086 (A8V, 17Myr) hosts a rare planetary system for which a multi-belt debris disk and a giant planet of 4-5MJup have been directly imaged. Our study aims to characterize the physical and orbital properties of HD95086b, search for…
A number of authors have proposed that the statistically significant orbital alignment of the most distant Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) is evidence of an as-yet undetected planet in the outer solar system, now referred to colloquially a…