Related papers: On the Capture of Interstellar Objects by our Sola…

Context. The populations of small bodies of the Solar System (asteroids, comets, Kuiper-Belt objects) are used to constrain the origin and evolution of the Solar System. Both their orbital distribution and composition distribution are…

Several celestial bodies in co-orbital configurations exist in the solar system. However, co-orbital exoplanets have not yet been discovered. This lack may result from a degeneracy between the signal induced by co-orbital planets and other…

Research in extrasolar-planet science is data-driven. With the advent of radial-velocity instruments like HARPS and HARPS-N, and transit space missions like Kepler, our ability to discover and characterise extrasolar planets is no longer…

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…

We report on the serendipitous observations of Solar System objects imaged during the High cadence Transient Survey (HiTS) 2014 observation campaign. Data from this high cadence, wide field survey was originally analyzed for finding…

Planetary transits provide a unique opportunity to investigate the surface distributions of star spots. Our aim is to determine if, with continuous observation (such as the data that will be provided by the Kepler mission), we can in…

Stars are not smooth. Their photosphere is covered by a granulation pattern associated with the heat transport by convection. The convection-related surface structures have different size, depth, and temporal variations with respect to the…

Building accurate and predictive models of the underlying mechanisms of celestial motion has inspired fundamental developments in theoretical physics. Candidate theories seek to explain observations and predict future positions of planets,…

The frequency of Galactic stellar encounters the Solar system experienced depends on the local density and velocity dispersion along the orbit of the Sun in the Milky Way galaxy. We aim at determining the effect of the radial migration of…

We investigate the prospects for the capture of the proposed Planet 9 from other stars in the Sun's birth cluster. Any capture scenario must satisfy three conditions: the encounter must be more distant than ~150 au to avoid perturbing the…

Peculiar velocities are the motions of galaxies due to the gravitational influence of large-scale structure, and thus are an important cosmological probe of the underlying matter density field. In recent years the number of surveys designed…

Radio wavelength astrometry of stars and other objects has a long and productive history. The use of that technique to determine whether stars have planets around them would cover a nearly unique part of the parameter space for detection of…

The discoveries of two Interstellar Objects (ISOs) in recent years has generated significant interest in constraining their physical properties and the mechanisms behind their formation. However, their ephemeral passages through our Solar…

After its formation, a young star spends some time traversing the molecular cloud complex in which it was born. It is therefore not unlikely that, well after the initial cloud collapse event which produced the star, it will encounter one or…

An observer stationary with respect to comoving coordinates of the expanding universe should find the redshift distribution to be isotropic. However, a peculiar motion of the observer would introduce a dipole anisotropy in the observed…

The flows in and around sunspots are rich in detail. Starting with the Evershed flow along low-lying flow channels, which are cospatial with the horizontal penumbral magnetic fields, Evershed clouds may continue this motion at the periphery…

In this review presented at the Royal Society meeting, "Cometary Science After Rosetta", I present an overview of studies of small solar system objects that exhibit properties of both asteroids and comets (with a focus on so-called active…

Since very recently, we acquired knowledge on the existence of comets in extrasolar planetary systems. The formation of comets together with planets around host stars now seems evident. As stars are often born in clusters of interstellar…

The solar photosphere is the visible surface of the Sun, where many bright granules, surrounded by narrow dark intergranular lanes, are observed everywhere. The granular pattern is a manifestation of convective motion at the photospheric…

In this chapter we review our knowledge of our galaxy's cometary population outside our Oort Cloud - exocomets and Interstellar Objects (ISOs). We start with a brief overview of planetary system formation, viewed as a general process around…