Related papers: Sharing the great conjunction
Our knowledge of the Solar System, encourages us to beleive that we might expect exomoons to be present around some of the known exoplanets. With present hardware and existing optical astronomy methods we shall not be able to find exomoons…
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the effective beginning of large, systematic redshift surveys of galaxies. These surveys have had a major impact on observational cosmology and on our current understanding of large-scale structures…
The James Webb Space Telescope will enable a wealth of new scientific investigations in the near- and mid-infrared, with sensitivity and spatial/spectral resolution greatly surpassing its predecessors. In this paper, we focus upon Solar…
Comet 157P is a faint object with a history of being prone to unfortunate situations, circumstances, and/or coincidences. Several weeks after its 1978 discovery the comet disappeared and remained lost nonstop for twenty five years.…
Context. High contrast imaging is a powerful technique to search for gas giant planets and brown dwarfs orbiting at separation larger than several AU. Around solar-type stars, giant planets are expected to form by core accretion or by…
Discovering other worlds the size of our own has been a long-held dream of astronomers. The transiting planets Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, which belong to a multi-planet system, hold a very special place among the many groundbreaking…
The vast majority of well studied giant-planet systems, including the Solar System, are nearly coplanar which implies dissipation within a primordial gas disk. however, intrinsic instability may lead to planet-planet scattering, which often…
Two planetary mass objects in the far outer Solar System --- collectively referred to here as Planet X --- have recently been hypothesized to explain the orbital distribution of distant Kuiper Belt Objects. Neither planet is thought to be…
Implications of the recently discovered systematic abundance difference between the Sun and two collections of `solar twins' are discussed. The differences can be understood as an imprint on the abundances of the solar convection zone…
Royal Society Discussion Meeting (2013) `Characterizing exoplanets'. Of the 900+ confirmed exoplanets discovered since 1995 for which we have constraints on their mass (i.e., not including Kepler candidates), 75% have masses larger than…
The outer giant planets, Uranus and Neptune, pose a challenge to theories of planet formation. They exist in a region of the Solar System where long dynamical timescales and a low primordial density of material would have conspired to make…
We announce the discovery of a planetary system with 7 transiting planets around a Kepler target, a current record for transiting systems. Planets b, c, e and f are reported for the first time in this work. Planets d, g and h were…
We report the discovery of a giant planet in the KMT-2016-BLG-1397 microlensing event, which was found by The Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) alone. The time scale of this event is t_E = 40.0 +- 0.5 days and the mass ratio…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
Nowadays, astronomers want to observe gaps in exozodiacal disks to confirm the presence of exoplanets, or even make actual images of these companions. Four hundred and fifty years ago, Jean-Dominique Cassini did a similar study on a closer…
The dynamical features of the irregular satellites of the giant planets argue against an in-situ formation and are strongly suggestive of a capture origin. Since the last detailed investigations of their dynamics, the total number of…
The upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will dramatically increase our understanding of exoplanets, particularly through direct imaging. Microlensing and radial velocity surveys indicate that some M-dwarfs host long…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large, infrared space telescope that has recently started its science program which will enable breakthroughs in astrophysics and planetary science. Notably, JWST will provide the very first…
Contemporary astronomy is undergoing a revolution, perhaps even more important than that which took place with the advent of radioastronomy in the 1960s, and then the opening of the sky to observations in the other electromagnetic…