Related papers: Anisotropy of Long-period Comets Explained by Thei…
Since 1950 when Oort published his paper on the structure of the cloud of comets it is believed that stars passing near this hypothetical cometary reservoir play an important role in the dynamical evolution of long period comets and…
The evolution of planetary systems around white dwarfs is crucial to understanding the presence of planetary material in the atmospheres of white dwarfs. These systems uniquely probe exoplanetary compositions. Periodic signals in the…
Most detected transiting planets have orbits which would fit within the one of Mercury, exposing them to intense stellar irradiation and interactions that significantly alter their properties. In contrast, colder planets with longer orbital…
Context. Breathtaking imagery recorded during the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission confirmed the bilobate nature of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko's nucleus. Its peculiar appearance is not unique among comets. The majority of…
Motivated by the astrophysical problems of star formations from molecular clouds,we make the first step on the possible long time behaviors of certain irregularly-shaped molecular clouds. We emphasis the main difficulty of the blowups of…
Future high precision photometric measurements of transiting extrasolar planets promise to tell us much about the nature of these systems. We examine how atmospheric lensing and (projected) planet oblateness/ellipticity modify transit light…
It has recently been suggested that a gravitational transition of the effective Newton's constant $G_{\rm eff}$ by about 10%, taking place 50-150 Myrs ago, can lead to the resolution of both the Hubble crisis and the growth tension of the…
The outer Solar System is believed to host a vast reservoir of long-period comets (LPCs), but our understanding of their spatial distribution and dynamical history remains limited due to observational biases and uncertainties in orbital…
We present new, ice species-specific New Horizons/Alice upper gas coma production limits from the 01 Jan 2019 MU69/Arrokoth flyby of Gladstone et al. (2021) and use them to make predictions about the rarity of majority hypervolatile (CO,…
Half the known extrasolar planets have orbital eccentricities in excess of 0.3. Such large eccentricities are surprising as it is thought that planets form in a protoplanetary disk on nearly circular orbits much like the current states of…
Ice naturally forms in the disordered or ``amorphous'' state when accreted from vapor at temperatures and pressures found in the interstellar medium and in the frigid, low density outer regions of the Sun's protoplanetary disk. It is…
Comets provide a valuable window into the chemical and physical conditions at the time of their formation in the young solar system. We seek insights into where and when these objects formed by comparing the range of abundances observed for…
In a recent paper we proposed that the giant planets' primordial orbits may have been eccentric (~0.05), and used a suite of dynamical simulations to show outcomes of the giant planet instability that are consistent with their present-day…
In this paper we explore several structural and dynamical effects on the projected velocity dispersion as possible causes of the fundamental plane (FP) tilt of elliptical galaxies. Specifically, we determine the size of the systematic trend…
The field of exoplanetary science has diversified rapidly over recent years as the field has progressed from exoplanet detection to exoplanet characterization. For those planets known to transit, the primary transit and secondary eclipse…
Long-period transiting exoplanets provide an opportunity to study the mass-radius relation and internal structure of extrasolar planets. Their studies grant insights into planetary evolution akin to the Solar System planets, which, in…
A gas giant planet which survives the giant branch stages of evolution at a distance of many au and then is subsequently perturbed sufficiently close to a white dwarf will experience orbital shrinkage and circularization due to star-planet…
Models of the zodiacal cloud's thermal emission and sporadic meteoroids suggest Jupiter-family comets (JFCs) as the dominant source of interplanetary dust. However, comet sublimation is insufficient to sustain the quantity of dust presently…
Comet C/2016 R2 PanSTARRS (hereafter C/2016 R2) presents an unusually high N2/CO abundance ratio, as well as a heavy depletion in H2O, making it the only known comet of its kind. Understanding its dynamical history is therefore of essential…
Our understanding of planet formation has been rapidly evolving in recent years. The classical planet formation theory, developed when the only known planetary system was our own Solar System, has been revised to account for the observed…