Related papers: Comet Fading Begins Beyond Saturn
The Sun will eventually lose about half of its current mass nonlinearly over several phases of post-main sequence evolution. This mass loss will cause any surviving orbiting body to increase its semimajor axis and perhaps vary its…
We investigate the brightening behavior of long-period comets as a function of dynamical age, defined by the original reciprocal semimajor axis, $1/a_0$. Our goal is to test long-standing claims about comet behavior using a large number of…
Jupiter co-orbital comets have orbits that are not long-term stable. They may experience flybys with Jupiter close enough to trigger tidal disruptions like the one suffered by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. Our aim was to study the activity and…
Currently, we have only limited means to probe the presence of planets at large orbital separations. Foreman-Mackey et al. searched for long-period transiting planets in the Kepler light curves using an automated pipeline. Here, we apply…
The study of comets affords a unique window into the birth, infancy, and subsequent history of the solar system. There is strong evidence that comets incorporated pristine interstellar material as well as processed nebular matter, providing…
Multi-planetary systems detected by the Kepler mission present an excess of planets close to first-order mean-motion resonances (2:1 and 3:2) but with a period ratio slightly higher than the resonant value. Several mechanisms have been…
Standard solar models predict a solar luminosity that gradually increased by about 30% over the past 4.5 billion years. Under the faint sun, Earth should have been frozen solid for most of its existence. Yet, running water is observed to…
Comets have been invoked in numerous studies as a potentially important source of dust and gas around stars, but none has studied the thermo-physical evolution, out-gassing rate, and dust ejection of these objects in such stellar systems.…
The Oort cloud, a collection of icy bodies orbiting the sun at roughly $10^{3}$ AU to $10^{5}$ AU, is believed to be the source of the long-period comets observed in the inner solar system. Although its existence was predicted nearly 70…
The solar cycle onset at mid-latitudes, the slow down of the sunspot drift toward the equator, the tail-like attachment and the overlap of successive cycles at the time of activity minimum are delicate issues in $\alpha\Omega$ dynamo wave…
While it is possible to estimate the dark matter density at the Sun distance from the galactic center, this does not give information on actual dark matter density in the Solar system. There can be considerable local enhancement of dark…
The close encounter of Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) with Mars on October 19, 2014 presented an extremely rare opportunity to obtain the first flyby quality data of the nucleus and inner coma of a dynamically new comet. However, the…
The steady-state gamma-ray emission from the Sun is thought to consist of two emission components due to interactions with Galactic cosmic rays: (1) a hadronic disk component, and (2) a leptonic extended component peaking at the solar edge…
In studies of the oldest solar system bodies - comets and asteroids - it is their fragments - meteoroids - that provide the most accessible planetary material for detailed laboratory analysis in the form of dust particles or meteorites.…
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.…
Kepler will monitor enough stars that it is likely to detect single transits of planets with periods longer than the mission lifetime. We show that by combining the Kepler photometry of such transits with precise radial velocity (RV)…
A significant fraction of super-Earths and sub-Neptunes are thought to experience an extreme loss of volatiles because of atmospheric evaporation in the early stages of their life. Though the mechanisms behind the extreme mass loss are not…
Planetary transits are commonly observed at visible wavelengths. Here we investigate the shape of a planetary transit observed at radio wavelengths. Solar maps of the Sun at 17 GHz are used as a proxy for the stellar eclipse by several…
In order to understand the origin and evolution of comets, one must decipher the processes that formed and processed cometary ice and dust. Cometary materials have diverse physical and chemical properties and are mixed in various ways.…
We present an investigation into the fate of disrupting near-Sun comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS). Imaging observations with the Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT), obtained 3--5 months after the reported disruption and the last sighting, constrained…