Related papers: On the Capture of Interstellar Objects by our Sola…
Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) influence the interplanetary environment over vast distances in the solar system by injecting huge clouds of fast solar plasma and energetic particles (SEPs). A number of fundamental questions remain about how…
Multi-messenger astronomy is of great interest. The localization speed of gravitational wave sources is important for the success of electromagnetic follow-up. Although current gravitational wave source localization methods take up to a few…
Scattering can rapidly degrade our ability to form an optical image, to the point where only speckle-like patterns can be measured. Truly non-invasive imaging through a strongly scattering obstacle is difficult, and usually reliant on a…
Meteor showers on the Earth occur at well known times, and are associated with the decay of comets or other minor bodies whose orbital paths pass close to the Earth's trajectory. On the surface, determining the closest proximity of two…
The search for minor bodies in the solar system promises insights into its formation history. Wide imaging surveys offer the opportunity to serendipitously discover and identify these traces of planetary formation and evolution. We aim to…
The field of extrasolar planets is still, in comparison with other astrophysical topics, in its infancy. There have been about 300 or so extrasolar planets detected and their detection has been accomplished by various different techniques.…
Our view of the high velocity cloud (HVC) system is changing dramatically with new observations from the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer mission and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph onboard the Hubble Space Telescope. In…
The in-situ detection of interstellar dust grains in the Solar System by the dust instruments on-board the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft as well as the recent measurements of hyperbolic radar meteors give information on the properties of…
Optical interferometry provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Through direct observation of rotationally distorted photospheres at sub-milliarcsecond scales, we are now able to…
In recent years, evidence has been obtained that in the outer region of the Solar System (in the inner part of the Oort cloud), at a distance $\sim300-700$ AU from the Sun, there may be a captured planet or a primordial black hole. In this…
This paper describes some interesting properties of waves in, and oscillations of, the interstellar medium in the direction normal to the plane of the Galaxy. Our purpose is to examine possible reasons for four observed phenomena: the…
Transit timing variations - deviations from strict periodicity between successive passages of a transiting planet - can be used to probe the structure and dynamics of multiple-planet systems. In this paper, we examine prospects for…
Dust grains migrating under Poynting-Robertson drag may be trapped in mean-motion resonances with planets. Such resonantly trapped grains are observed in the solar system. In extrasolar systems, the exozodiacal light produced by dust grains…
High-precision astrometry on sub-micro-arcsecond level in angular resolution requires accurate determination of the trajectory of a light-signal from the celestial light source through the gravitational field of the Solar system toward the…
We present a fast trajectory optimization algorithm for the soft capture of uncooperative tumbling space objects. Our algorithm generates safe, dynamically feasible, and minimum-fuel trajectories for a six-degree-of-freedom servicing…
The serendipitous detection of stellar occultations by Outer Solar System objects is a powerful method for ascertaining the small end ($r \lesssim 15$ km) of the size distribution of Kuiper Belt Objects and may potentially allow the…
The NASA Kepler mission is providing an unprecedented set of asteroseismic data. In particular, short-cadence lightcurves (~60s samplings), allow us to study solar-like stars covering a wide range of masses, spectral types and evolutionary…
A surprisingly large amount of information on our solar system can be gained from simple measurements of the apparent angular diameters of the sun and the moon. This information includes the average density of the sun, the distance between…
The proliferation of space debris in LEO has become a major concern for the space industry. With the growing interest in space exploration, the prediction of potential collisions between objects in orbit has become a crucial issue. It is…
We investigate whether rings around extrasolar planets could be detected from those planets' transit lightcurves. To this end we develop a basic theoretical framework for calculating and interpreting the lightcurves of ringed planet…