Related papers: The Brute-Force Search for Planet Nine

The Solar sail is a large thin film used to collect solar light pressure for moving of space apparatus. Unfortunately, the solar radiation pressure is very small about 9 mkN/sq.m at Earth's orbit. However, the light force significantly…

A feasibility study was carried out at the Astronomical Observatory of the Autonomous Region of the Aosta Valley demonstrating that it is a well-poised site to conduct an upcoming observing campaign aimed at detecting small-size…

Are there other planetary systems in our Universe? Indirect evidence has been found for planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy: the gravity of orbiting planets makes the star wobble, and the resulting periodic Doppler shifts have been…

Exoplanet research has shown an incessant growth since the first claim of a hot giant planet around a solar-like star in the mid-1990s. Today, the new facilities are working to spot the first habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars as…

A complete manual search has been carried out of the list of 285423 objects, nearly all of them galaxies, identified in the COSMOS field that are brighter than I=25. Two certain and one highly probable new gravitational lenses are found, in…

I present a review of observational efforts to study known extrasolar planets by methods that are complementary to the radial velocity technique. I describe the current state of attempts to detect and characterize such planets by…

Cunha et al. (2018) recently reexamined the possibility of detecting gravitational waves from exoplanets, claiming that three ultra-short period systems would be observable by LISA. We revisit their analysis and conclude that the currently…

Recent analyses of the orbits of some Kuiper Belt objects hypothesize the presence of an undiscovered Neptune-size planet at a very large separation from the Sun. The energy budget of Neptunes on such distant orbits is dominated by the…

EarthFinder is a Probe Mission concept selected for study by NASA for input to the 2020 astronomy decadal survey. This study is currently active and a final white paper report is due to NASA at the end of calendar 2018. We are tasked with…

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope was designed to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets orbiting Sun-like stars, but these planets are on the very edge of the mission's detection sensitivity. Accurately determining the occurrence rate…

It is not known if, in addition to the Newton's inverse square law component, the gravitational force has some non-Newtonian, long-range components that have escaped detection until now. For example, the non-Newtonian component of the…

High-precision radial velocity planet searches have surveyed over ~2000 nearby stars and detected over ~200 planets. While these same stars likely harbor many additional planets, they will become increasingly challenging to detect, as they…

The Euclid space telescope will observe ~10^5 strong galaxy-galaxy gravitational lens events in its wide field imaging survey over around half the sky, but identifying the gravitational lenses from their observed morphologies requires…

Gravitational microlensing provides a unique window on the properties and prevalence of extrasolar planetary systems because of its ability to find low-mass planets at separations of a few AU. The early evidence from microlensing indicates…

Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of M dwarfs are good candidates for the study of habitability and detection of biosignatures. To search for these planets, we analyze all available radial velocity data and apply four signal…

The recent discovery of "dark energy" has challenged Einstein's general theory of relativity as a complete model for our macroscopic universe. From a theoretical view, the challenge is even stronger: general relativity clearly does not…

We propose the concept of a space mission to probe the so called flyby anomaly, an unexpected velocity change experienced by some deep-space probes using earth gravity assists. The key feature of this proposal is the use of GNSS systems to…

The suggestion in 1986 of a possible gravity-like ``fifth" fundamental force renewed interest in the question of whether new macroscopic forces are present in nature. Such forces are predicted in many theories which unify gravity with the…

A resultant gravitational force due to the current estimates of the virial mass of the Milky Way galaxy, dominated by dark matter, is estimated near the Sun and is described in two different analytical models yielding consistent results.…

The discovery of giant planets orbiting close to their host stars was one of the most unexpected results of early exoplanetary science. Astronomers have since found that a significant fraction of these 'Hot Jupiters' move on orbits…